I think it’s pretty safe to say that the majority of us are here to avoid another corporate takeover of our preferred platforms. It would seem to me to be a tad irresponsible to allow Facebook into our space with open arms, allowing them to hoover up our data. I would love to keep using Lemmy.world, but will happily change instances if need be, and I feel many share that sentiment.
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Well, right now Meta is pushing, not pulling. Meaning, Threads content can be displayed on Masto, but not the other way around.
IMHO, the bigger threat is having Threads content completely dominate other activity pub clients. Other clients / communities could get dependent on it. Then Meta is basically a drug dealer with leverage.
Data collection doesn’t bother me too much. I’m not going to install their client and all of the behavior trackers that come with it, and my activity pub content is already freely available to query on the internet. If they want it, they already have access to it. Everyone does.
Since lemmy can’t pull from mastodon/threads, it seems like a complete non issue for now.
Correct. This is an issue for Masto, not Lemmy. It may never be an issue for Lemmy for all we know. Lemmy is focused on following activity pub communities not individual people.
It’ll affect Kbin.
No offense but Kbin users have a lot more to worry about than the threads issue, considering the amount of development and moderation problems that plague kbin to this day.
This thread isn’t about kbin though. We don’t need to clutch pearls about other services on fediverse when discussing what happens with Lemmy instances.
But we do need to look out for our peers.
Lemmy pull from mastodon if someone from mastodon mentions a user or community of lemmy instance
Interesting. It seems that Lemmy can see Mastodon users and send private messages to them. And I believe Mastodon users can create Lemmy posts, so potentially Threads users could do that too once Meta enables two-way communication.
It all depends on how the Meta teams implements ActivityPub and which parts of it.
Data collection doesn’t bother me too much. I’m not going to install their client and all of the behavior trackers that come with it, and my activity pub content is already freely available to query on the internet. If they want it, they already have access to it. Everyone does.
I will be able to follow and see friends’ posts and sports teams’ posts through Mastodon without needing a Meta account nor install their shitty apps.
All I posted via fediverse is public already, traveling into some obscure instances, so I don’t care if Meta uses or shares my public posts.
Honestly I like the ActivityPub idea. If ActivityPub becomes mainstream I am fleeing mainstream social media.
Or you could just create your own locked down, nerdy circlejerk instance for people like you.
That’s my plan 😂
;)
This article is so misleading. XMPP died for the same reason all technology dies. No one used it. Even if Google hadn’t ever used it, it would still be dead. I know this because Google Talk and ALL Google chat apps are dead. WhatsApp killed them all.
You are more correct than they are but are still wrong*. A lot of the interest in XMPP died after they started pursuing standardization and of course after Google close off their servers. It never had a ground swell before or after that either though. XMPP however, still exists to this day. And has become integrated into internet of things, protocols for communications between devices and as well as more comprehensive communication services such as SIP. They literally just had their 2023 Google summer of code complete a month or so ago?
But yeah XMPP is not dead. Unfortunately, it was a surpassed by a number of other services that offered more. Evolving faster than XMPP could while looking to become standardized. It only lost relevance to most. Not it’s life. For what it’s worth since 2000 or 2001, there’s hardly been a day that I have not been logged in to an XMPP server. I’m logged into one right now.
In other words, Threads could help spreading the ActivityPub protocol more, not the other way around
God why are all crying about XMPP? If you want to make it more popular just start using it yourself. If you don’t have anyone to speak with over there just speak with me (seriously DM me).
Also we have a lot of open source alternatives by now so XMPP is just one of many good options which means that the people will go whith what they feel comfortable with. Trust me, if XMPP would be the only decentralized, open source chat protocol around I’d be using it exclusively and many others would probably too.
I think xmpp is just the example of what could happen to the fediverse if Facebook follow the same play
So you’re saying Facebook will lose interest in the feddiverse and leave it largely unscathed to go on to do what it has always done? Not sure why people are so doom and gloom about this. This seems like the best outcome you all would want.
No, I think the point of the article is that they might try to siphon off all the casual fediverse uses with flashy features and big names and then break compatibility
There’s barely anyone to siphon right now.
Damn, if only there were examples written down somewhere, perhaps online, where we could read theories based on past events about this potential situation.
Oh well i guess 🤷♂️
This, the real threat is the amount of content that federates out possibly hurting others servers’ performance as their enterprise kit will scale better.
I like your perspective. More people need to realize that they are responsible for what they put out there.
Threads content completely dominate other activity pub clients. Other clients / communities could get dependent on it. Then Meta is basically a drug dealer with leverage.
How? Because this doesn’t make an yota of sense to me.
Flipboard federated. Are you flooded with news from them?
Minds is also federated. I bet most people in this story had no idea and have never seen a single post from minds.
even if they are only “pushing”, there will still need to be profile data exchanged with Threads in order to access it, if they have http signatures enabled (i.e. authorized fetch under mastodon)
This is what happened with Google and XMPP
They’d hoover up your data regardless lmao. Anything you post here is fair game. It’s not the same as Instagram measuring how much you look at a post or your location.
Yeah so many people misunderstand data on ActivityPub.
So you post on social media because you want te be publicly discovered? Yes
Then why are you whining because your public posts were publicly discovered?If that were the only argument I might consider your point, but there’s also the point of troll farms. You can easily identify a third party troll farm fedi instance, but Zuckerberg will keep them anonymous as long as they keep paying him. Are you not aware of the amount of shills and trolls we got on reddit advocating for:
- Russia
- Conservative republicans
- Conspiracy theories
- Corporations such as Monsanto
I’m not fucking kidding, if you paid ANY attention to what happened to Reddit in the years after Spez took control, you’d realize that amplifying voices funded by corporate or foreign government money is bad for fucking everyone.
Facebook has shown, time after time, that they don’t give a shit about actual free speech, democracy, human rights or even complying with the law.
Why do you keep treating them as if they were only a social network? Have you been living under a fucking rock?
If you like corporate social networks so much, go back to reddit.
I still prefer blocking it myself and having the control myself.
Well on Lemmy it’s fake control considering this system wasn’t really designed to safeguard against malicious actors but rather to stop snowflakes from being offended.
Also the instance blocking feature doesn’t even block users, which you and everyone else suggesting people use it would know if you even read the changelog for 0.19 and saw this little qualifier right here:
Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.
If you want real control yourself what you need is your own Lemmy instance, or to co-operate a Lemmy instance with somebody else.
Exactly, this whole whiney demand to defed threads is dumb.
because only argument is about data ._.
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public timelines, enable whitelist federation and require authorized fetch for federating
And all of that can be circumvented by pulling the data via the RSS feeds or plain old scraping.
Authorized fetch and domain blocks may be effective to stop drive-by trolls, but do nothing to stop anyone with a minimal amount of resources and interest in scraping data from a social network.
The reality is simple: all information that you put on the web should be considered as publicly available. Those that want or need absolute privacy should not use information in the fediverse and resort only to provably secure communication protocols.
I don’t know of any major instances that have enabled any of those… And all getting around it would take is to create an account on the instance- which for instances without admin approval can be done fully programmatically anyway so it wouldn’t even require human intervention, just a few extra lines of code.
If your instance is federated it doesn’t matter how “locked down” your instance is it’s pushing data out of the walled garden lol
And that’s ignoring the fact you can just create an account on the target instance then hit the instance’s API
I was surprised to see lemmy.world didn’t defederate. I hope it does. And, I hope a mod weighs in on the planned direction for the instance.
There is no real need right now. Lemmy is focused on following communities, not individuals. This is more of an issue for Mastodon than Lemmy.
It might never be an issue for Lemmy. Threads would need to start organizing people around communities, or Lemmy would need to encourage people to follow individuals (something Reddit promoted and no one cared about)
That’s actually an argument for defederating atm. Because Lemmy can’t pull Threads content, but Threads can without making that fact public.
Not sure what you mean. They can already pull any public data on lemmy, as can anyone else.
They weighed in months ago back when it was announced and said they were taking a wait and see approach, where if it did cause problems they would defederate, but didn’t want to preemptively do so. Many other instances did defederate already though.
Whichever way instances decide to go there’s a few things people should remember:
- We’re lucky to have this option even if it’s divisive at times.
- It’s not always about what we know will happen, sometimes it’s concern over possibilities we couldn’t even imagine at the time.
- Growth is great but there’s infrastructure, moderators and policies that can be overwhelmed.
- Defederation can be reversed at any time if things change.
Federation can also be reverted at any times if they misbehave. Why should we block them in advance?
Track record.
Historical precedent and #2/#3 on my list above make the case for erring on the side of caution. That and we’ve got far more to lose than to gain.
Unless threads implements the full activitypub spec then everyone should be defederated from meta. There is a fine line for meta to walk to not harm the fediverse. Lemmy World is one of the few instances that can handle it. But meta should not be allowed to be a guiding voice in the direction of the fediverse at all
+1, with an additional condition: when Meta inevitably tries to co-opt the activitypub spec and modify it in incompatible ways that only benefit themselves they need to be defederated immediately.
They can try to push ActivityPub development within the W3C without actually using it btw.
The Facebook hatred is understandable and justified, but defederating with Threads is a misguided idea:
- Federation is not required for them to be able to pull the data. Even if you block an instance, they can still pull whatever they want.
- By closing down with Threads, you’ll be basically guaranteeing that that all the millions of people that are there will never be able to migrate away.
- By getting major (current) instances to defederate with Threads, it gets easier for Threads to just say “hey, we tried to be open but they still rejected us, so we are just going to go back to our walled garden.”
Buddy i am here to avoid the lizardman and dont want him anywhere near me. Free software always has been an alternative to corprates and never a replacement. In the name of evangalic fediverse we should not give up our freedom. And above all this whill become like the trade agreement between Hati and the US.
As far as free software goes, how does running free software on your own server that you allow others to communicate with using established standard protocols violate your freedom? Not saying you shouldn’t be able to be selective about federation, but why would Facebook specifically being one of the peers violate your freedom?
I know that facebook will not rip you off your freedom just as windows wont stop you from removing or uing your computer. None the the less they will have significamt impact on the fediverse for good or bad and their influence might affect in someway we cannot predict.
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I mean, the last point is weird. They’d never say that, and do not care about the illusion of being open.
Point 1 is true.
Point 2, what makes you think federation will make millions of users want to move away, or even know folk are on another service. They’ll probably censor the word lemmy and every lemmy address to avoid folk advertising away. The fediverse will just be filled with nonsense data and they’ll pull the stuff that helps their platforms and keeps people hooked on the teet. Without that data, they may not be at critical mass to sustain Threads and it might eventually die. With that and Twitter going to pot, avoiding federation actually helps Mastodon as it provides a distinguishable separate entity that has reached critical mass and has significant good will with the user base that motivates them to keep sharing content.
They’ll try to dominate the way the protocols evolve. Try to push more and more crap into it because they’re too big to ignore. Insert becoming ad, bot, corporate friendlier stuff. Fediverse doesn’t need meta. It’s nice and cosy and rather friendly here, I’ld like it to stay that way. It’s like Google dominates some “open source” and pushes browsers towards more and more DRM friendly etc. We don’t need that.
It’s nice and cosy and rather friendly here
And absolutely irrelevant in terms of impact. We have at best a few hundred MAU on a good month. Facebook/Google/TikTok are controlling billions of people.
If we truly believe in the superiority of the Fediverse and that it is possible to have an alternative social media for everyone, we need to go and fight Big Tech. Defederating on the grounds of “I like it the way it is” is coward, selfish and completely lacking ambition.
we need to go and fight Big Tech.
Fight them by…doing exactly what they want?
Do they want us to let them federate so that their users can use Threads as a stepping stone out of the walled gardens?
Why would that happen?
People who used Google Talk didn’t use it as a stepping stone to XMPP. They stayed on Google Talk.
Google was not charging people to talk on their network, and they didn’t make it harder to reach someone once they got it. So there was no reason for people to jump out. Facebook, on the other hand…
When the internet was in its infancy, companies and small businesses first established their online presence by getting a aol.com or hotmail.com. Running your own email or website was still expensive and not something easy to do. Today, having “your own” social media and being in control of your brand is almost as easy as having your website and your domain. I am not saying that everyone will jump out of Threads, but if Threads ever gets successful enough to replace Twitter and if we don’t shut them out of the Fediverse before it happens, at least there will be an opportunity for small businesses/media orgs/influencers that want to keep reaching their audiences (like they do today on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube/etc) and also want to take control of their own presence.
That’s not dependent on federating at all. Meta is a member of W3C, they can be a part of developing and evolving ActivityPub at any point without actively running a service with it.
yes, very misguided. I always loved the idea of browsing “All” and see all top brands with millions of engagement promoting their products
I thought users could block instances now?
Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.
So yes but not exactly. It’s not as effective as you would think that an instance block would be if it doesn’t block the users. That’s not even addressing the fact that Lemmy’s blocking isn’t even really blocking it’s more along the lines of muting, it’s just named blocking.
AP does not allow for the pushing of ads.
that’s irrelevant. Nothing prevents the influencers to promote their products as they do in all the popular platforms. You’re thinking only in terms of ads as coming from an ad server but this is not necessarily the case.
that’s irrelevant
You’re complaining about ads that are being pushed on you by an algorithm from ad companies. I’m telling you there are no ad companies. Seems relevant.
Nothing prevents the influencers to promote their products as they do in all the popular platforms.
Nothing prevents them from doing that right now.
You’re complaining about ads that are being pushed on you by an algorithm from ad companies. I’m telling you there are no ad companies. Seems relevant.
I never typed the word “ad”. I specifically said post of top brands. How can this be achieved in ActivityPub? Easy. When you are using lets say Threads, their proprietary system treats differently ads and normal posts. However, anything their system is pushing on the federated network (ActivityPub) is disguised as a normal post. A post that is having millions of engagement will be visible in “All”.
Nothing prevents them from doing that right now.
You act like you’re new to internet. What prevents them is that their audience is not here and companies are not paying them for that. However companies will pay them to promote their products in Threads. With the current numbers, Threads has the potential to dominate the “All” page.
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Doesn’t defederating just mean they can see our content but won’t see theirs? At least it was like this few months before. Now if this is true we would lock ourselves out of the discussion while they could still do anything they wan’t with our content.
am get off old place without federation
when were you supposed to be responsible for others independent actions
That’s the thing: actions from other users and from the key players are not “independent”. It is a social network, actions and reactions depend on the context and the relationships of everyone involved.
I’m actually really trying to play devils advocate… But I’m struggling.
I came to get away from the main stream socials.
I came to minimise my farmed data footprint.
I came to find other like minded people.
These principals alone are shared by quite a few I guess.
If we end up hooked up to the machine we were trying to escape from then coming here was near pointless.
Seems like everyone who is “for” letting threads stay can be summed up by “why would I want to intentionally separate this from a corporate entity when they’ll just get my data anyway” Like that’s a fucking valid argument.
Oppose corpos at all fronts, it doesn’t matter if they’ll get you anyway. If that’s your take, then if your country ever gets invaded, I expect you to bend over and invite the enemy inside.
When it comes to Corporates it very much is like the Nazi Bar allegory: you let one Nazi stay because he’s beheaving rasonably and not being nasty, and sooner or later the place is going to be full of his friends and turned into a Nazi Bar.
It’s the same dynamic only with corporate logos, advertising, hypercommercialism and eventual enshitiffication instead of swasticas, racist messaging and violence.
Certainly in my eperience of it since the 90s, the Internet changed very much this from its early days and spirit as commercial interests from their original foothold almost entirelly subverted it to serve their interests.
Meta should be fully jetisoned from the entire federation. If people want threads, join threads. edit: If people want their sports and brand posts then aggregate using RSS for corporate and non-corp social media. The whole purpose of the fediverse was to be NOT linked to tech bro empires.
On one hand: great, federated tech is catching on.
On the other hand: fuck these clowns, they’re not participating in good faith. If Meta wants to join the fediverse they need to interoperate fully with other instances instead of using activitypub to poach fediverse users.
I’m 100% convinced Meta is pulling a classic embrace, extend, extinguish move here.
Last thing they need is our users. Threads is already bigger.
Honestly, I think they see the idea of the Fediverae a threat, and want to embrace, extend, extinguish.
There’s no way they see it as a threat. They have millions more users. They’re just not as engaged or active perhaps as we are. But by the same token most of us are very against meta and other companies like them. There is no reasonable or logical way in which they could extend, embrace or extinguish it. Though I would be very interested to see you try to explain how. And it’s especially funny to see all the people being manipulated. Who have no idea what really went on trying to claim that Google embraced extended and extinguished XMPP. The XMPP work group just finished up their 2023 Google Summer of code for Christ’s sake. Google didn’t kill them and they’re not dead.
Is it? After the initial account register, it looked like it was running out of steam. I’d be surprised it lasted long without something new.
Mastodon was immediately dwarfed from the very first day Threads was launched. Total Fediverse MAU has been hovering a but under 2 million, Threads first day user signups totaled more then 30 million. Threads’ growth has leveled off now but it’s still orders of magnitude more massive.
Threads users didn’t sign up, it used their Instagram account. Even if they used it once, they click across, and boom, account there and they cannot delete that Threads account after. An initial day registration does not mean a MAU. It’s like saying MySpace is huge now because everyone had an account…
Edit: Usage plumetted massively- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/14/threads-app-slump-daily-active-users-twitter-competition
Threads’ daily app downloads have universally been in the range of 350k-700k for the past month. Mastodon’s MAU for the same time period has been 1.1 million.
More people downloaded the threads mobile app in the past three days then have interacted with Mastodon in any capacity for the past month.
allowing them to hoover up our data
Hate to break it to you, but the fediverse is public. Most instances don’t even require an account for read-only access. If Facebook wants your data they don’t need to federate to get it.
Seconded. Fuck Meta.
Why does it seem like everyone with this position is unaware that data here is already available publicly?
Please expand on how you believe blocking threads improves your privacy.
Why can’t it be as simple as fuck Facebook! I don’t want a multi billion dollar corporation playing in my sandbox.
