Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you’re a server admin, please defederate Meta’s domain “threads.net”
If you don’t run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate “threads.net”.
Yeah dude let’s just federate with an instance maintained by a corporation that has undoubtedly caused a genocide in Myanmar by turning a blind eye to a far-right hate speech group that caused an entire fucking minority to flee into another country.
I don’t get why people are supporting and saying “oh it must be up to the user” like bro this is the company we’re dealing with. Fuck that fuck threads fuck zuckerberg i don’t want his shit cancer near something that’s going well so far.
Israel have been successfully pressuring meta to remove and shadow ban accounts sympathetic to Palestinians. The level of censorship is crazy.
OK, I’ll bite. You got something more substantial than “I read it on the internet” to back that up? One reputable source on your accusation? Not sayin’ you’re lying/wrong, just asking for some verifiable proof.
Numerous actual popular accounts and news sources have been suspended. It was major news in the Arabic-speaking world in October. Meta even apologized for auto-translating Palestinian as “terrorist.”
At the moment this is coming from secondary sources from within meta so there are no articles about it that I’m aware of. But Palestinians and activists constantly have their content removed, account reach limited, and comments removed (which has happened to me multiple times). People also have their accounts threatened and removed.
These actions are visible constantly, meta have been doing this since the start. For example, when you go to someone’s stories at the top it might show 4 or 5 stories, but when you click through to their profile there’ll be 20+.
Some people I follow don’t even show up at the top anymore and I have to access their stories via their profile page or if I’ve messaged them recently.
Well a good friend of my girlfriend is from Gaza. He has been posting translations from his sister’s account of what it is actually like living there right now. Then some AI artwork behind stories of “this place was bombed, my friends just were killed, etc…” and he got a big notification on Instagram that “his account has been restricted for violent hate speech” even though he didn’t incite violence even one time. He just has posts with 2nd person stories of the situation there.
If they want to hang out with us, they can make an account somewhere other than thread, bam, done!
If they want to hang out with us, they can make an account somewhere other than thread, bam, done!
“make another account somewhere” isn’t really what federation is about.
Indeed it is, they’re not saying you have to make an account on that person’s server, they’re saying that you can make it on a different server, that’s the point of federation you can join other servers that are connected to them. It’s not to be fully open without any limitations, because if it were then content moderation would be impossible.
Services like Nostr have this problem, they are like the wild West where anything goes and you can’t do anything about it. To some people that seems great but the fact of the matter is those services are filled with right-wing trolls and crypto scammers (likely plenty of other nasty stuff as well) because they cannot be moderated.
What do you think it’s about? Because from my perspective changing instances is kind of the entire defining feature that separates it from commercial platforms.
I feel like that’s exactly how it was billed to me, find somewhere that federates with who you want, and if that changes, you’re free to move
I’m not sure if federating will help meta so much as it will definitely (most probably) hurt the lemmy/mastodon network.
Here’s a similar case that happened before, with the XMPP protocol being coopted by google but eventually killing it in favor of their own proprietary solution:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Big tech isn’t on our side, and we have to handle outside corporate influence with heavy skepticism.
lemm.ee already made the decision, based off of the voice of the community to defederate from Threads
Lemmy.Ca admins blocked Threads about 5 months ago: https://lemmy.ca/comment/901551
You can confirm that Threads dot net is still blocked by Lemmy.Ca by going to https://lemmy.ca/instances and clicking on the “Blocked Instances” tab.
Thanks, I actually forgot that one can check!
lemmy.dbzer0.com also blocked Threads
please take a look at the replies under zuck’s own post in threads.net and determine if that’s the type of content you want.
for those who don’t want to visit, majority of the commentators are bots. some advertising crypto, and others asking for money.
even if you think you can individually block those accounts, keep in mind the size of threads compared to fediverse.
for Lemmy: monthly active users are barely 150K40K, while for threads it’s 100 million. there’s no chance you can control that inflow of bots.
and if it still doesn’t convince you, you can read threads’ privacy policy, which states that they’ll gather all that pii if you interact with their content.
most of the internet is already bigtech, I don’t want Lemmy to become another arm of it. though I have faith in my instance maintainer and dessalines, the dev.
Comment stolen from user “copygirl” from blahaj.zone:
Looks like they’ll be harvesting your data if you follow anyone from Threads, maybe even injecting ads. Unsure what happens to the data of people that get followed by a Threads user. A large part of the fediverse is here precisely because they want to escape corporate meddling, data-hoarding, advertising and other anti-user malpractices. There’s a number of people talking about this, here’s a recent post that highlights some of the things from their TOS.
It’s not as if something was preventing them from
data-hoarding
and
harvesting your data
here anyway.
So that part about being followed by a Threads user is just a bit stupid.
The danger is in them becoming an integral part of the network where people don’t bother to register at a normal instance, and then Meta pulling out and the network remaining half-dead.
Anyone can collect the data anyway, and I’m sure at least one person out there is already harvesting our Fediverse data.
There’s a big difference between some random person and Meta collecting the data.
Who says that Meta is not already harvesting our data? Lemmy really is about moving control out of corporate hands and decentralisation advantages, but profiling is insanely easy on the Fediverse, and it really cannot be different because of its inherent interconnectedness. It makes no sense to migrate from conventional social media to Fediverse equivalents if all one cares about is privacy.
How do you know that meta hasn’t created an account on a popular well federated server and it’s using those credentials to scrape the fetiverse?
You have to assume whatever your post to the Internet is available to anyone and everyone connected. Why would federated servers be and different.
Is there any sort of legal precedent that covers a situation where:
- I am a user on a network server.
- Meta connects their server to my server so their users and I can interact.
- Am I now bound by a terms of service on Meta’s server that I have not agreed to and may have never seen or been presented with?
When I joint my instance, am I implicitly agreeing to any terms of service that exist on any instance that my instance decides to federate with?#
Lemmy and mastodon profiles are public so I don’t know if privacy concerns are a problem unique to federation with meta considering they could just scrape your profile if they wanted the data that bad. I’d be much more concerned about small instance admins losing funding as users migrate to instances that federate with meta until threads and the big instances are the only ones left on the fediverse
