Lemmy.world Should Defederate with Threads

PopOfAfrica@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 838 points –

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.

444

You are viewing a single comment

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.

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.

Lemmy pull from mastodon if someone from mastodon mentions a user or community of lemmy instance

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.

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

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 🤷‍♂️

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

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)