It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:
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Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)
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Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)
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Defederate (wait and see)
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Defederate with the intention of staying defederated
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Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too
It’s all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.
In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?
I’m not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.
But have you actually tried it? Here’s a sample. Go take a look. (EDIT: My link is worthless unless you are logged in to mas.to. Go look up username fediverse@lemmy.world in your Mastodon client of choice)
It’s a completely unmanageable firehose of comments, spewed only in chronological order.
Honestly, the link between incompatible types of social media like Lemmy and Mastodon could be severed in my opinion, because it’s mostly just novel with little benefit.
If you’re not on mas.to that link will just collapse back to a lemmy.world view.
We need to think this through from the standpoint of an instance admin who is trying to figure out how to use Threads to make their instance grow. That’s really the only motivation I can think of to federate with Threads. Otherwise it’s just all downside. As a corporate social media entity, they are entirely opposed to everything Lemmy stands for philosophically, and their scale is a massive threat to the culture and operations of the much smaller fediverse. Why would anyone ever want to federate with them? Because they see it as an opportunity. To ride the dragon, thinking it can be controlled. This is madness. Choice 4 all the way and if it becomes necessary, 5.
The beauty of the Fediverse is you do not need to make everyone else agree with you. It is important that mods know what you want; what you think other people should want is irrelevant.
No, you don’t need to go around making other people agree with you, on the fediverse or anywhere, really.
But if you are going to enter into a mutual risk/benefit relationship with another party, it does help to understand what their motivations are, so you can figure out if they’re going to line up with your own, or lead to conflict.
My post is about trying to understand those parties’ motivations. Not make everyone agree with me.
They already got millions of users. Depending how they’ll implement federation, the sudden influx of millions of unmoderated users into the fediverse might wreak havoc to small instances. So personally, I prefer no. 3, defederate (wait and see).
I’m starting to dislike the concept of ActivityPub. It gives power to the admins instead of to the users. Users should be able to decide what servers they connect to and what content they see. I hope another protocol like Nostr becomes more popular.
You can also use third party providers like these guys who can set up an activity pub centric website for you.
That looks like a pretty good starting point for people who have just a moderate understanding of servers and websites
Yeah that’s something I’ve not seen discussed here much. I get that people want control, but getting started with an ActivityPub centric site (like kbin) is now cheaper than ever. Get your own cheap hosting on a VPS and handle some traffic.
People can even create their own instances just to federate with everyone and absorb their content if they’re worried about the rules and regulations or “x server not connecting with y”
Overall I think it’s a pretty good system compared to a single silo like Reddit
Except when people choose option 5 from this list and defederate you because of who you are federated with.
As an instance admin, lol.
I’m paying for the server. I’m handling all the maintenance, moderation, etc. You’re out of your mind if you think I’m gonna allow nazis or whatever other horrible shit is out there anywhere near my instance. I’m not going to enable bigotry. Fuck that.
Everyone can see my instance’s TOS as well as who I’ve defederated and why. If they don’t like it, they can find another instance. They’re not entitled to an account on mine.
So why is it important to not federate (or block) with Thread? Asking seriously. I read the article and while those are valid and real concerns. What is the net gain of that action? How does it help the fediverse? I cant see any way that it helps and lots of ways it hurts. At this point it seems like a lot of what ifs.
Edit:
If you need the reasons why to block Threads (meta) I think the answers below explain it better than most!
From what I understand, they’re likely trying to kill the fediverse by making it irrelevant (embrace, extend, extinguish) seeing how it’s finally starting to grow, since they can’t just buy it up this time like they’ve always done to competitors.
Even aside from that though, their algorithms designed to retain user attention by any means necessary are definitely going to seep into and poison the fediverse, at least indirectly, if they’re federated.
Not to mention they could easily run ads as normal posts and boost them artificially; they are an ad company after all. Wouldn’t put it past them.
Not federating with them means we don’t have to deal with all that, and the fediverse can just continue to grow naturally as it’s been doing.
Federating on the other hand means a very real risk of permanently halting the fediverse’s growth in favour of corporations’, like Google did to XMPP
That’s a good point. Would it not make more sense to block/de-federate when they start being bad actors rather than preemptively block? I’m not saying that preparing is bad, I think it’s very much need and valid to assume they will be bad actors. I would like to be wrong and believe that being good hosts is better for their bottom lines. I do not expect them to do anything good because it’s the “right” thing.
If there’s one company you should preemptively block, it’s Facebook. They have a track record of destroying anything and everything they touch and there is zero reason to think it won’t be the same this time. From this post:
They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
Once federated, an instance get a ton of data about users and their actions. I am not willing to provide that to facebook.
Defederating is a one-way transaction. Any instance that defederates from Threads will only stop themselves from receiving data from it, but Threads will still be able to pull data directly from any and all instances.
With enough instances not federating threads thr data they can get will become spotty.
I understand it might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s nothing on threads I want to receive.
CMV: The people who want to receive data from Threads should just…make a freaking Threads account. The whole argument to connect with them at all is weird. It’s like recording a Disney movie to your DVR box and setting up streaming from your smart TV to your tablet so you can now enjoy the movie you recorded in bed…when you could’ve just downloaded the freaking Disney+ app.
It’s also (somehow) like when you’re already in shorts and a t-shirt but still a little warm and someone else wants to turn the A/C off cause they’re cold. They can put on more clothes and be totally comfy, I cannot (politely) take any more clothes off.
@ninekeysdown @jocanib i would say its because its meta trying to get a foothold on the fediverse and possibly take people away from here. people might just use threads instead of mastodon or lemmy since they can get the content on threads. my take
Wouldn’t more people using federated software be a good thing? EEE is a valid concern eg XMPP (GTalk). I’m not sure (not saying it’s impossible) how that would happen in this case. I see it being more like email than XMPP for instance. I could be way too idealistic & optimistic as well
Basically my understanding of the fear is this:
Meta joins.
Meta makes friends with everyone because they are playing the long con. They act nice to start, play by the rules, etc. nobody thinks they are nefarious.
Meta develops features that users want on top of the existing framework. These features are things everyone actually wants, not what meta wants because meta is hooking people -give them what they want so they use it, then walk it back later, perhaps silently as a “bug” that just never gets “fixed”- perhaps they suppress aspects of the platform, like make the community/individual finding hide the instance it’s on to make it feel more like centralized social media, perhaps they release entirely new features that enhance the experience. Either way, they make small changes because they can, which lowers the experience of those who interact with it because it’s intentionally buggy with FOSS versions. They likely have FOSS versions running so they can test compatibility to make sure they provide a slightly better experience (why wouldn’t they?)
Users join the meta instance for the enhanced features because they don’t actually care about how the fediverse works, they want a seamless experience (which currently the fediverse does not really offer, none of us can say otherwise)
Meta becomes the biggest instances of activity pub, but with enhancements that make other instances super buggy.
Nobody wants to be on the buggy instances so they switch to meta if they don’t care about privacy.
Meta pulls plug. Fediverse dies (they hope) or at least goes back to only being used by the small subset of the population that would never consider the giants to be options. They pulled all the people they could from what already existed.
Now whether or not that’s actually an issue for a platform that actively wants to be “counterculture” (which fedi absolutely does) is yet to be seen… but we already know what meta wants, which is money, and FOSS and money aren’t really compatible. Just on principle. So what meta wants and what they are doing are at odds currently, and I think it’s only a matter of time before they show the hand they have to play.
But I think that’s what the “defederate immediately” group is hoping to prevent. We all joined because we are sick of the hostile takeovers (even if the media companies technically have every right to do so with their own product) and to prevent being beholden to one of the major players. If everyone defederates immediately, meta won’t be able to actually embrace, because they aren’t being embraced back. At that point all they can really do is fork the software, but they would probably scrap it. It’s not exactly a great platform for a company that has their own.
Importantly, why else would they adopt it? What value does free and largely unmonotizeable software actually have for meta? If they wanted to for themselves, they could easily build a Twitter clone. They didn’t. They adopted a free open source platform. Why? What value does that hold for them over just making their own, if they don’t feel threatened by the alternative?
@ninekeysdown just more people using the fediverse isnt the main goal. or at least my goal. its keeping the stuff foss, privacy respecting, and etc. activity pub allows for federation but what is built on top of it can be proprietary as hell. as is the case of threads. im threatened by threads because its taking away peoples privacy.
