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.
If 9 regular people sit down with a nazi without protest, you have 10 nazis. Threads will absolutely not stop nazis from posting nazi stuff. We know this because Facebook is full of nazis. Why would anyone want nazis at their table? Because they’re nazis. Anyone who wants to federate with Threads is a nazi. Do you want to federate with nazis? Option 5 is really the only way to keep the nazis away from the table. This is not an exaggeration. There are literal nazis given free reign on Facebook. There will be literal nazis given free reign on Threads. If you don’t stop the nazis because you want to interact with your friends who interact with nazis, you’re enabling nazis. Don’t enable nazis. I can’t stress enough they are literally nazis.
What does Threads have to do with Nazis? We are talking about the new Twitter competitor from Meta, right?
Apparently this guy thinks Nazis are everywhere. Almost reminds me of Russian propaganda, Ukraine is full of Nazis we need to go over there and clean house etc.
It sounds like they just don’t like people with differing opinions and anyone who doesn’t toe the line must be a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser 🙄
5 is an absolutely horrible idea.
1 and 2 are best
I tend to agree but there may be some small and especially vulnerable communities which need the privacy. I don’t know but I’m happy as long as everyone gets to have an instance which suits them.
Not that 1 and 2 are best though. 2 and 3 unless you want to be drowning in swastikas and child porn.
The whole point of this is that I want my instance to federate with threads. I want to be able to interact with my friends on there from the safety of the fediverse. I don’t want to have Mastodon for Mastodon and Mastodon for Threads. I want Mastodon for the Fediverse.
I want my instance to federate too. But I respect that other people want differently and that’s fine. We don’t need to tear each other apart.
If there’s no such thing as authentication when you view posts, you have no privacy anyway. Everything you post online can be seen by anyone and archived anytime. It’s not like you have privacy when you post now.
Why do people keep pretending data is what you choose to post publicly but not also your name, email address, phone number, health records, financial records, and web history?
Mastodon has no data to give them other than what I choose to publish on the platform.
For many people, it’s not about whether people can take the effort to see what they’ve posted online. It’s whether people who would harass them have a friction-free path to do so, and Threads is such a path. It will be all but totally unmoderated with respect to hate and harassment, and will be the biggest Nazi bar on the block.
Protecting the vulnerable means keeping the assholes away. If we can’t care about the vulnerable, then I guess we deserve Zuck.
Doesn’t authenticated fetch kinda fix that? If users have the option to make their account private except to logged in other users, and if the server enables authenticated fetch to reject access from blocked / de-federated servers, then only logged in users from servers the server grants access to federate with will be able to view the content. That seems like some useful measure of privacy at least.
Only real threats of Threads federation are EEE and server overload. Not the people from there or privacy. If someone wants to see some content you don’t want to see, like some opinion you don’t like, they should be able to see it. I don’t understand why there would be such list, it would be pure censorship and waste of time. I have heard Threads has a pretty good moderation, so that solves this problem anyway.
I don’t get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
I don’t get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
Means the instance isn’t part of the hive mind and we obviously can’t have that!
I am a fediverse enthusiast and I am excited for Threads federating. I hope it incentivises Tumblr to federate also and then we actually finally have proper choice.
I see you’re not familiar with EEE. This is a classic move by enterprise to kill an open competitor.
I don’t get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
Site A hosts communities that serve vulnerable people. They see Meta as a threat to those vulnerable communities, as they are not well moderated, and have no issues with hate speech and harassment, so they defederate.
Site B federates with both Site A and Meta. They act as a pass-through for content from Site A to reach Threads.
Bad actors on Threads see content from vulnerable people on Site A and engage with it. People from Site A cannot see the bad actors on Threads doing this, but people on Site B do, and bad actors there get alerted to an opportunity to be proper shit stains. Now, vulnerable people on Site A get targeted by this induced harassment coming from Site B.
What does Site A do?
They defederate from Site B.
The question is just about whether they wait until the harm has been done or not.
Defederation is a one-way block of incoming traffic from the blocked instance. I’m on lemmy.world and can still see Beehaw content posted by Beehaw users even though they’ve defederated from lemmy.world, but if I comment on that content it will only be visible to lemmy.world users. Beehaw has protected its communities from lemmy.world commenters, but its content is still accessible by anyone for any purpose. Instances that federate with both sides don’t change this.
I’m looking at beehaw communities on both Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org,and they’re totally out of sync with each other. There’s the rare post from a beehaw user that breaks through somehow - possibly boosted from a kbin or Mastodon instance? - but for the most part, you’re getting basically none of the content from those communities.
Because beehaw isn’t sending you any updates.
Is it that you’re seeing beehaw users who are posting to communities hosted on 3rd party communities? Because that’s absolutely possible.
And that’s absolutely the issue with federating with sites that continue to federate with instances you’ve defederated from. You’re blocking direct communication in both directions, but there’s a lot of indirect communication going on.
Like, this is literally the scenario I described.
I don’t understand why there would be such list, it would be pure censorship and waste of time.
A major point of the Fediverse is that you can choose instances based on their moderation policies. If you want fash crawling your timeline, join an instance which allows fash to crawl your timeline.
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.
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.
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
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.
Everyone is talking about defederating preemptively because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. So, doing what any exec does, he looks for buzzwords and trends to make his new product more exciting. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
I agree. All the Fediverse is to the Silicon Valley firms is the current buzzword. Like you said; if- and to me, it’s a question of if and not when- Fediverse integration gets built into Threads, it’s gonna be limited. My bet is that somehow they’re gonna make it so that Threads instances can only federate with other Threads instances.
And that’s if it exists at all. I feel there’s a considerable chance that Meta just throws away the Fediverse integration idea. Either it’s too much effort for too little profit, or some new buzzword comes along for them to chase.
