I suppose Metas history of actively being a bad actor working against societies best interests and enabling hate groups doesn't qualify as 'something'...
Honestly it isn't. Nothing about the Fediverse is private or inherently secure in that way. Everything is public. And you should assume that everything you publish through activity pub could eventually be looked at by anyone. If you want private or secure messaging there are non-activity pub open source secure alternate. In fact signing up for Lemmy there's even a field to enter for one. Whether or not a server federates with meta. Meta is still going to data mine the ever-loving shit out of all of them. The point is. None of us are at Meta's wim about being flooded with their toxic content.
Honestly I want to see meta flooded with our content. So much anti-threads anti Meta sentiment. Actual leftists. And not just make believe right-wing liberals who've been conditioned to think that they are left. It would be hilarious to watch Meta try to play wack-a-mole sanitizing everything. To please their reptilian corporate overlords. And if you don't care and just don't want to see it. You can always block them personally. Why let them data mine in peace. I say we make them work for it.
I'm not real sure how much the Threads Algorithm is going to pass through Mastodon content (and even less sure if it will even be able to pass through Lemmy content). I think the much more valuable aspect is you can pitch your Threads friends that they can move to the Fediverse and actually get to choose what content they see rather than which influencers paid Meta to fill up your feed.
Agreed about influencers. Meta wouldn't be doing this at all if they didn't have a plan (or multiple plans) to monetize it. The whole reason I left Reddit and plan to leave Twitter was that I very much dislike having any part of my online enjoyment at the mercy of the whims of gigantic corporate assholes that think they are far more important than they are. Meta has been an awful and abusive actor in the tech world, why would any freedom-loving person want anything to do with them in a freedom-loving space?! Why would anyone just wait and see what they do this time to decide they're an awful company with only their profits in mind and no qualms about making those profits at a cost to its users?!
It's not really about privacy, though. It's about the risk of Meta going "Embrace, extend, extinguish" on the fediverse, and the only way to protect against that is by not letting them interact with the majority of it from the get-go. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I would add to this that its not just the fediverse, anything you put on the internet should be assumed to be public and non-deletable. Even with GDPR and everything, if the host deletes everything there could dtill be backups, archives, or some random person, corporation, or government could backup everything. Use secure services like signal for things you want to be private and just assume everything else could be public forever.
Oh damn guess I will migrate to lemmy.ml and use that until I find out if lemmy.world defederates or not.
(Edit turns out it is run by tankies and they are federated with lemmygrad.) While I may or may not stay on lemmy.world depending on if we federate with meta or not. I will no longer suggest Lemmy.ml.
I'm not in a hurry to migrate, as Threads doesn't support federation yet, but is not a bad idea to keep an eye on other instances.
Is mastodon.world the same as lemmy.world?
The admin is the same person, so is expected that they apply the same policy for both instances.
This is not particularly surprising. Lemmy was started as an anti-corporate project by leftists after /r/chapotraphouse got quarantined and later banned (subreddit for the most popular podcast and most donated patreon at the time), with the explicit goal of preventing corporate control from being able to silence leftists when they're blasting off. CTH was skyrocketing in subscribers at the time it was quarantined on August 8th 2019, and when even quarantining didn't stop its growth or slow down its activity afterwards Reddit pulled the plug under the excuse it promoted violence, but the only particularly edgy thing ever said there was "slave owners should be killed" and support for John Brown. This evolved post-ban into the assessment that Spez banned it because he wants to own slaves.
When that happened there was a massive shift in the leftist parts of reddit as we very quickly realised we'd be targeted if reddit ever deemed us to be too successful, and projects like Lemmy began in reaction. CTH's community in fact moved to Lemmy 3 years ago, and resides on Hexbear.net but has not yet joined the rest of federated lemmy due to technical issues (it used to be a fork with a different front end).
Given lemmy's specific anti-corporate origins seeing Lemmy.ml do this should surprise nobody. It's the correct move anyway.
Always love to hear the deep lore. Lemmyβs early development makes a lot more sense now. Good on them(you) to leave everything open and learn from Redditβs mistakes.
Still, free and open has a limit. No Facebook and no Nazis. Thatβs just common sense everyone used to have.
The paradox of tolerance is real, and a particularly thorny issue for social networks.
Philosophies that promote intolerance can not be tolerated by tolerant communities.
Completely agree - If lemmy.world doesn't block very shortly I will move to a different instance.
https://fedipact.online/ is a list of instances that have pledged to preemptively block Threads. Includes my own instance (lemmy.name) among many others.
Same, performed the update to 0.18.1 and figured "well I'm already here so..."
I'll have no part in playing their game.
Back when I was a kid and got my first computer, I was mostly offline except for the occasional dial-up session. I didn't have much to do on the internet anyway and it was quite expensive. I remember being amazed the first time I have set up to meet a friend over ICQ, rather than a phone call, of being able to communicate with other computers from mine. It didn't matter whether these computers were at a neighbors' house, a different city or entirely different country. I was looking forward to the internet giving us ways to connect like never before. No barriers, just directly communicating and bridging cultural differences and whatnot. Little did I knew that this was just one phase, as the internet gets more and more segregated. Rather than connecting with people, it gives you the ability to filter out whatever you don't agree with, while staying connected with those who share your beliefs. It's like we are no longer living the same reality and can't even agree over fundamental things. I miss the old naive days of the internet when we feared viruses and the occasional pedophile in a chat room. Nowadays it's the possibility of spreading misinformation that could overthrow a government. Either having it going uncontrolled and unregulated, or having a private company in control of such power.
Personally, I think that this should be the choice of an individual user rather than the platform.
I am proud of Lemmy.ml for defederating. The second I find out if kbin social or lemmy world defederate or not I will just move to the other one since I use both.
(Edit turns out Lemmy.ml is run by Tankies and also allows federation with lemmygrad.)
As a paid up lemmy.ml annual subscriber, I support this and am very happy with my choice. Good job guys.
Exactly. This is why federation is cool. The individual can choose where to go. Oh, kbin and lemmy.world, you didn't defederate from the corporate shills? OK then, I shall defederate myself from you. Plenty of instances.
The admins/devs are communists, they hate anything corporate related, so it's no surprise.
Based
Based
Tankies is a word that better suits them imo. I consider myself a socialist, but those guy are fucking defending the CCP (chinese comunist party) and are very trigger happy with the banning switch. So yeah, i dont think this is a win but more like bussines as usual.
I don't really think federating with them is doomsday, tbh (though I go back and forth on this one), but that doesn't affect my primary reason for my nope. Threads consolidates everything I hate about corporate social media--and for that matter, all social media--without a single part I actually liked and made dealing with the other parts worth it. This is not a twitter clone; it's like someone asked chatGPT to create a social media network based on twitter for other chatGPT bots to talk to each other. For fuck's sake, it doesn't think its users should control what they see on their own feed.
I am perfectly willing--even eager--to perform melodramatically about things that annoy me in public for fun and when I'm bored and applaud others doing the same; it's fun times for all and possibly my favorite thing ever. This is not that.
Threads makes my skin crawl on concept. This is not 'they do not align with our values' because come on, Fediverse contains a multitude of values and invents more and i bet if asked, everyone here would list off a different set of values they believe encompass Fediverse and now I'm tempted to see because it would be hilarious. But we can't even get that far; Threads has no values. This would be a marriage of convenience to a real doll fueled by Facebook's algorithms and sponsored by Wal-Mart; whether or not it's a danger to Fediverse shouldn't even have come up because the first question that should be on anyone's minds is 'wait, this is actually a serious question?' and have been answered 'lol of course it's a joke, I just forgot to add the /s'.
I'm still waiting for that /s.
I've actually just asked that in another post, because I am kind of interested in what people see as Fediverse main idea.
But, thanks for this summary of how Threads looks like, since I'm avoiding it like a plague. You seriously can't even select what content you see? Fuck, that's way worse than I though - that's so obviously a ML model manipulating with people without holding anything back. I hope they've at least done something with the misalingment where it seems to just radicalize people to keep them on the platform, because if not, the world is fucked.
I think defederating from them is a no-brainer for the fediverse, but who am I? Just a user of the fediverse. I do not own an instance. I choose the fediverse over meta and its facebook crap, so for me it's a no-brainer. For owners of instances, maybe it isn't such an easy decision. It costs money to run an instance, for example. Federating with the Facebook corporate goons at first will seem useful to some instances, especially the big ones that want to stay big and general. When the big and general ones that fall for Meta's scheme to take control of things, the smaller instances on the fediverse that chose to defederate will be there to join.
I've been thinking on that and assuming fosstodon and lemmy.world both agree to defederate with Threads, I'm going to go ahead and set up regular donations. I only use DW a few times a year, but I renew my premium membership every six months and it's not cheap. I want to keep supporting it because its model does not include ads at all (premium gives you lots of icons, too, and I used to be a huge icon person, so I can't say that's not a consideration). Unless I lose my job or something, I'll keep paying until death or dw closes whether I ever use it again; it's worth supporting.
I was already considering it--when i joined mastodon I bought their stickers to show my appreciation--but this is been a wake-up call. If lemmy.world decides to federate, I mean, I'm not going to leave, but I am going to email lemmy.ml about why my application is still pending and use that for my primary.
It's not about Zuckerberg, it's about the userbase. With something that grew to 30 million users literally overnight, it's impossible to determine what it will be like, and how it will mesh with the existing fediverse content/users.
With something this scale, it only makes sense to secure and observe - pre-emptively block, watch the content, maybe even poll the users on what should be done. There is nothing to be lost this way, it's only a cautious approach towards a potential later link.
What could be lost is the Threads community overwhelms the lemmy community before there is a chance to react (it is 1000x bigger, after all). It makes sense to be cautious, here.
This isn't inconveniencing anyone, any user can make an account on Threads as well and use both right now.
If I wanted to see facebook shit I would use facebook, I stopped using whatsapp when it was bought by facebook, I don't want to see their content overwhelming the fediverse, that's why I'm here instead of there.
Fun thoughts and all but that isn't the reason why they're blocking it. It's because Facebook is bad. Corporation, big, embrace, expand, extinguish, evil. Plenty of explanations around about why these blocks happened. However you're also right. If it were very small like a 15k people instance and it didn't carry corporations inside maybe they'd consider not blocking.
I don't think threads actually has 30 million users. They have some paid shills, probably a lot of their own bots, some people who legit joined to see what it was about, and a bunch of Instagram users who had accounts created automatically. I'm not positive about the last point but if you can't delete threads without deleting Instagram then I'm sure they're going to leverage their Instagram userbase as much as possible here.
Look, Mark has royally screwed up Facebook. Any respect or honor with the guy has long been lost. Why even give him a second chance when it's obvious he's going to do the same thing with Threads?
His Metaverse failed.
His Facebook/Meta thing failed.
He is a huge red alert to be involved or close to the very things we're trying to recover and escape to from things he has contaminated. Why chance associating with him?
Also consider Embrace Extend Extinguish, he is using federation purely as a resource to stand on
Ideologically, de-federating an instance just because you don't like the guy running it would be a bad thing, but Facebook/Meta has been just so toxic to the internet as a whole it's hard to really find fault with it.
My concern is less Suckerburg as much as Meta's corporate history. My expectation is that they'll try to use this to conquer and destroy Lemmy.
Ideologically, I find more fault in inviting meta to the playground than locking them out. They are the very definition of an evil corporation and no good can come of it.
Iβm actually shocked by the growth of threads, I underestimated how much people donβt care about their digital privacy.
You are using a social network on some random dude's server.
That is very true, but I have a little more trust in this random dudeβs server where he gets access to what? He sees my IP address? Than a corp that collects an unnecessary amount of user info for the sole purpose of keeping you locked into their apps with little disregard for health. While also pimping your info out to any persons with $2 to their name.
Any random person is at least a hundred times more ethical than mark Zuckerberg.
Agreed. Ruud has done a lot of great things for .world in its short time, but I don't agree with his decision on this... I do hope he changes his mind.
There's no need to "give Meta a chance," they've already demonstrated who they are time and again. And I don't want to end up having to leave .world in the future because the traditional Fediverse split in two, and .world is on the wrong side of it.
how about making a poll on lemmy.world asking how we feel about defederating from metatrap, just to see...
Waiting for others to follow.
They'll be devastated when they find out my closed instance with 2 users, 1 of which is inactive, also pre-emptively de-federated them. I shudder to think they'll ever recover.
Hey bud, be the change you want to see in the world!
I do try to be
Is there an advantage to hosting your own instance?
I already owned the domain and have access to a server with more than enough resources, so it didn't have a downside to me.
Upside, I don't really have to worry about anyone else's federation choices. Undesirable content like loli/shouta stuff doesn't appear at all, because I'm basically the only user and don't subscribe to anywhere that exists so it doesn't federate to me anyway. My instance never lags because nobody but me uses it. Sometimes it misses comments through federation from overloaded instances, but it seems like the newer version of Lemmy has helped that greatly.
For me, yes. My instance is considerably faster and has better uptime than any of the instances I have created accounts on. Mostly because I'm the only one using it.
Yep, while other were complaining about issues it was smooth sailing for me.
On the flip side, discovering new communities is a pain, and whenever i subscribe to a new community it can take hours to start populating comments.
Honestly, not really.. But, it does put you in control over your destiny.
I don't know. I would like to subscribe to someone on Threads from Mastodon (since both are Twitter alternatives), if they don't have Mastodon account (which let's be honest they probably don't). Zuck does not get any of my data (besides what's available publicly anyway). If Threads decides to go full EEE, I'll stop getting updates from people on Threads, same as I don't get updates from people on IG right now. I think proliferation of ActivityPub protocol would be the greatest advantage.
Moreover, I think we should follow the email architecture - I might use i.e. Proton Mail, but it does not prevent me from sending emails to Gmail, which I think is a bad provider, who collects a lot of user data. In fact if Proton Mail forbade sending email to Gmail I would be really displeased about that.
The goal is to allow people to choose where they want to go and ActivityPub is what can help with that, unlike blocking Threads.
i ONLY want to conter your argument with email and activityhub: on email people choose to send stuff to a very limited amount of people except maybe newsletter and scammers. with threads, which should have already multiple times of osers compared to the fediverse, will flood the content to /all. Of course there are cool people but i think the entire fediverse culture will be blown away by threads in an instand. And with their weird moderation (especcially small) servers here will have large problems trying to moderate it
but by email there is no mass broadcasting to the public so it does not need to be moderated
I couldnβt agree more. Racing to block Threads when itβs completely unclear if Threads will even actually ever federate and what the implications of them federating will even be seems incredibly short sighted. Imagine how much innovation would have been lost on the internet if web server admins raced to block Google Chrome from accessing their content because they have some personal beef with Google.
Very good news. Between Pi Hole and uBlock Origin, any links to threads is already blocked on my computer. Nice to see you folks preventing the linking to this privacy invading boil of the internet
When companies like META show you how ruinous they are the first dozen times, over and over without end, you believe them, and you defend yourself, or you deserve every bad thing that's going to happen to you, when they repeat their corporate driven ends at your expense
I'm on the fence here. Luckily, at least, I think community/subreddit-based sites like Lemmy/Reddit don't have "network effects" that are as "sticky" as Mastodon/Twitter, because with Lemmy/Reddit you don't need to build up a follower list to start getting value. You just join the community and it's as if you immediately "followed" a bunch of people who share your interests. You don't even need to make an account - you can just bookmark a community and lurk, and maybe you eventually make an account to start interacting. It's a great "on-ramp" - very low barrier to entry/usefulness.
I think that's why Lemmy was able to take off so fast. It relies on community-level coordination, rather than every individual user having to make their own choice to switch, and try to get all their followers/followees to switch. So even if Meta did add a community-style mode, I don't think it'd eat into the Lemmy userbase. It is hard to be sure though, and I respect the choices of those instances that have blocked/defederated.
Mastodon admins have a harder decision to make I think - there's an opportunity to get very quick growth by effectively adding a lot more followable users/content. A bunch of people don't like Meta/Facebook, but want to follow their friends, and so they may use Mastodon to do that, which could get a lot more people to move to "real" fediverse apps/sites like Mastodon. I know a lot of people that are on Threads now, and I'm looking forward to being able to follow them from Mastodon, rather than being forced to get Threads to keep up to date with what they're working on.
No fences up my ass here, I didn't jump so quickly to lemmy to be immediately joined to fucken Facebook.
Like. At all. I'd bet a quick poll would speak loudly
UPDATE: Those rumours have been confirmed as at least one Mastodon admin, kev, from fosstodon.org, has been contacted to take part in an off-the-record meeting with Meta. He had the best possible reaction: he refused politely and, most importantly, published the email to be transparent with its users. Thanks kev!
kev should've accepted the meeting to see if they could infer the intent...
Well done. I hope more of the fediverse follows suit. Facebook has a long way to go to restore trust -- if that's possible at all. They're nowhere near that threshold yet.
Personally I donβt think there is anything they could do gain trust short of undoing their data harvesting. Which would destroy them as a business entity/platform.
There's no way to build, let alone restore, trust with that kind of business model. All behavior manipulation companies need to die. Their mere existence is unethical.
(Apparently) Unpopular Opinion: I think defederating Threads is the wrong move, because it just locks people into Threads. If people on Twitter had the ability to move to Mastodon AND still interact with all the people they did before, I think we would have seen even more people move. The only reason I still check twitter at all is because I have a few close friends who didn't move. Meta is likely going to have big adoption of people who aren't ready to go to Mastodon, but are interested in getting out of the dumpster-on-fire that twitter seems to continue to be. But blocking those people from being able to join the more popular Lemmy instances, given no actual policy violations, just will keep people in Meta that otherwise could leave. With the "however" being: It's not quite clear to me that Threads users will be interacting with Lemmy as much Mastodon, if Threads were a Reddit replacement, it's more directly connected.
The problem isn't with the user base. It's with Meta and their business practices. People very simply do not trust Meta or Facebook and with good reason.
That's exactly it. Deleted my Instagram account when I learned they signed me up for a Threads account automatically. Haven't used Insta in years, but Mark says I have to have a Threads account. So Fuck Zuck.
Threads got 80 million users in 48h. Those people are not gonna use Mastodon anyway. They don't care about their privacy, they don't care that some proprietary algorithm is gonna decide what they will see, they don't care that it's Facebook. Those people have no standards. The only way we can help them is by educating them and if that doesn't change their mind, then there is nothing we can do, because freedom and privacy is not something they value. People who value them are capable of making a small sacrifice of not using some website when an alternative exists.
Facebook either just wants to use the Fediverse for their own benefit or they want to destroy it before it becomes a bigger competitor. We shouldn't risk all that we have built just because we live in an ignorant society that doesn't understand technology.
Fully agree. It would be like saying people with @gmail addresses can't email people on @someFederated.com email addresses. Also I think (and correct me if I'm wrong here) the idea of "defederating" gives power to some in a way we hated reddit admins having power. Suddenly it's "totally the fediverse except when...".
Imo fuck that. If I don't like threads I won't use threads the same way if I don't like lemmy.someinstance I won't interact with lemmy.someinstance. leave it open and let the users choose. But also let's educate. Some will listen and some will roll their eyes. But it's a choice.
Being the "Ban Happy" socal media is a bad thing and an even worse reputation.
I debate if its a good thing to let FB just have free content with asterisks as I have no idea whitch way the cup of users will spill
EDIT: FB is a parisite that has a small enugh heart to use agressive tactics like Embrace Extend Extinguish, be careful if we do let them in and always be ready to shut that door)
Another thing, lemmy.ml, reddit, twitter, (tiktok for good mesure) as well as Facebook and sons (and likely more) have sensorius admins, moderating above what most users want and warping conversations to pretend like "this is what people are saying online and nothing more nor less".
To be overly flippant: "lol problem child blocked other problem child"
I understand your viewpoint but you have to realize meta/Facebook has done this before. The best solution to protect Lemmy/mastodon in the long run is to cut the cancer out before it has a chance dm to spread.
When you cut off a cancer, it dies. When you defederate a social network orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than you... it doesn't even notice and continues to thrive.
This isn't going to harm Threads or protect Lemmy.ml.
There we go. Not the wishy washy mastodon non-announcement. Although I understand their "neutrality" too, it's still like they wanna seem like the big boys. Sometimes it's advantageous to be small. This "fuck you" may be just adorable to Zuck, but it's also genuine.
Can someone ELI5 this situation to me? Not sure what Meta can do to instances/the Fediverse.
People are worried that they'll embrace, extend and extinguish it. That is, join the fediverse, make Threads a better client than any of the existing ones until everyone uses their client, then use that extra reach to harm the fediverse.
I'm personally not that worried, because of who we are. We're a bunch of geeks with anarchist leanings, and so probably wouldn't switch to Threads anyway.
Please remember the example of Microsoft and open source office document formats. And in the early days of Internet Explorer with HTML. The risk here is that Threads will embrace the fediverse for a bit. Then they will incorporate features that are only available in Threads that will bleed users away from the open source options. All the while vacuuming up user data for profit while having distain for user privacy. Why would we want to allow them to cast aside the privacy for only one of our users? Are we not going to act like stewards for open source and protection of user privacy?
This us exactly the threat. They'll start setting standards that other instances will be pressured to follow. Those standards will be ways to control the fediverse and make it a propietary data-gathering and sales/advertising platform just like everything else.
I am worried because I want and we need non geeks to be on lemmy as well for it to be great.
Yes. Diversity of thought is great. We can enjoy our nerdy echo chambers, but in the end we get outvoted IRL. We need to both know what's going on in the larger world, and we need some way to help educate. This theoretically allows the best of all worlds.
Yeah, I enjoy a ton of hobbies where a lot of the people that know their stuff aren't particularly computer savvy. If they're not on my platform because it is too technically complex, I'm probably going to at least visit the more walled off platforms (not usually a fun experience).
Maybe? But a lot of people have exited reddit over the last month. Maybe not the average user but not the most hardcore geek anarchist either-they weren't on Reddit to begin with. Then there are the obvious reasons that a lot of people have left Twitter an those are the same type of people leaving reddit. So mastodon is probably more at risk than Lemmy but I don't think for a second that meta would not throw together a Lemmy competitor if they smell any money whatsoever in it.
Either way you run risks simply by interacting with threads, even if you interact accidentally. Their entire business model is to suck every last piece of data out of you that they can so they can sell in every way they can possibly think of to monetize it.
Since lemmyworld has no intention of blocking them I'm finding another instance to move to. Better safe than sorry with a company that has a horrific record on every single issue. And that way if they federate then back out, I won't be losing anything because I'll have never seen that content to begin with.
The will federate, try their best to suck as many users from fediverse as possible into threads, then defederate and become a walled garden again.
As for how they will suck users away:
Make their algorithms prefer posts from threads, so anyone wanting to reach a wider audience needs to move to threads
Add twitter like checkmarks that are only available for users of threads (they will say it is for security since they need to verify the idwntity of checkmarked people)
Add features that are not exposed on activity pub, so that you have to be on threads to use them (twitter did the same by for example not making polls available over API)
Intentionally make their activity pub slow and unreliable to make it look like other instances are broken and threads is fast and reliable.
They will start setting standards that other instances will be pressured to follow. Those standards will be mechanisms to control the fediverse and make it a data-gathering ad & sales platform.
This is what people want to avoid. Meta is a bad actor, they intend on making their presence ubiquitous so people end up relying on it for their internet experience.
Y'know how you need a Facebook account to sign up for all sorts of things now? That's what people want to avoid happening in the fediverse.
It's simple really. If something as large as Facebook federates, you will never be able to know whether the users you are engaging with are actual people somewhere, and not just large language models.
It's happening on reddit right now. The only value to this sort of website is engaging with actual people.
If I wanted to talk to a chatbot, I can already do that. Meta has proven again and again that it will manipulate it's users with insidious content and moderation, and will knowingly harm users, such as by selling user data to foreign governments or deliberately fomenting depression and anxiety in its users, even kids.
I mean, they can turn it into total shit like they did with Instagram and Facebook.
You shouldn't be. These companies are not here to play along, but dominate. Just like reddit played along with 3rd party developers until it didn't need them anymore, so will Meta use the openess of the protocol to ultimately undermine it.
How does that work? Is threads using a protocol compatible to lemmy?
(And I fully agree with the preemptive blocking of any facebook stuff).
Edit: thanks for all the detailled answers.
So Facebook tries the old EEE - Embrace Extend Extinguish.
1.A big company is Embracing an open source standard ("we're friendly, see?) They get a lot of users that way - even the open source savvy types.
2.they start Extending that standard "to make it even better" - but not talking about these changes with the rest of the community first. They cannot react quickly enough and become incompatible with the new version of this standard.
3.Extinguish. When all the users are effectively using the big companies platform with something that isn't the original standard anymore they change it so much that it isn't compatible at all anymore or replace it completely.
Threads is using the protocol that the entire fediverse is using, called ActivityPub. The protocol allows for lemmy instances to communicate with each other and with other sites like kbin and mastodon. What lemmy.ml did is called defederation, so threads can't communicate with lemmy.ml. This is to prevent meta/Instagram/Facebook from killing ActivityPub in the same manner Microsoft, IBM, and Google has killed open source protocols in the past.
Yes. Threads wants to use the ActivityPub Protokoll. We can interact with Kbin and Mastodon users thanks to this Protocol. The fear is that they use their huge user base to change the protocol to their liking (basically take control over the ActivityPub) and everyone who wants to stay federated with them and their users has to adapt those changes until the day they will simply cut everyone off.
I don't generally judge people based on their appearance, but this man's face gives me the heebie-jeebies. There's something alienating about the lack of affect he seems to have, plus his features seem to be an approximation of a human face - the mouth is too small, the ears too big, the forehead too shiny...
He looks like an AI image that managed to crawl out of the screen like the kid from The Ring
Can y'all stop using this goblin as the thumbnail? Thanks
So that settles it. We have an option if meta federated and it goes to shit. Lemmy.world's stance is correct. Let's just see how this goes.
You don't wait and see how it goes with these sorts of things. They will destroy the community before you can take action and it'll be too late. They will do their best to destroy the fediverse and privatize it. They can't buy it like they usually do with competition, so they'll ooze their way in, contribute bullshit to the project, create new proprietary functionality that only works on their instance, convince everyone all the other instances are broken, and walk away with all the users. You don't invite vampires into your house.
Not sure what to think of this honestly. Like imagine a small email provider decided to block Gmail, that's a death sentence. It's impossible to get people to switch apps when they have to leave behind all of the content and people they used an app to interact with. And let's be honest, threads is going to run at a loss for a long time to grow their userbase before they start pulling weird shit. We need to have a migration path when that happens, and if threads is blocked everywhere, people will lose their content and contacts upon switching, so they won't do it.
I consider email (and snail mail) a significantly more essential service than social media. Email service providers starting to block each other is much more likely to have a negative effect on my life than being disconnected from some friends, influencers or current news
Gmail doesn't use an algorithm designed to make you depressed and lead to a higher rate of suicide among teenagers. Facebook and Instagram does. And Meta knows it did since day one of implementation.
The difference is that the email protocol has long been established and any new email client is built to that protocol standard. What we have here is an open protocol still being developed. The fear is that FB will force changes into that protocol and take it over. Then it will no longer be an open development protocol. By expunging FB right now before they get a firm grip on the userbase it can preemptively prevent FB from causing damage.
We are kind of in unexplored territory right now. You could compare it to google/MS taking over xmpp but it's not quite the same situation either.
But the reality is that the current fediverse doesnt need facebook to be successful. It already has the users to continue to grow. By combining user pools facebook would have the majority share with their instagram users which means they would have a controlling share of users and would leach users away from the fediverse over time until they broke away at which point fediverse would die as most users would be forced to follow in order to keep their feeds.
This way those feeds never mingle with FB and thus fb cant leech them.
In an ideal world, your suggestion might work. Unfortunately it will fail in practice. How are we to determine when it's not too late to migrate?
Personally I don't care for those users. If they want to blindly follow their piper, let them. But I don't want that cancer ruining more OSS.
That's why it has to be done now - before we rely on them for content.
This isn't email or LinkedIn, it's not about who's on it - it's about content and the community
If we join with them, we'll get way more content and a way bigger community - not a better one though.
We need enough, and we need organic growth. We don't need a firehose, and definitely not one held by the people who made social media what it is everywhere else
I would agree if we were talking about another centralized social media site, bit I'm here to escape the interface of sites like Facebook.
Meta's Twitter clone. The smart thing they did was convert over Instagram accounts, so there's a ton of semi-famous people on already. It's got a ton of attention in the past two days, just for being Twitter sans Elon.
Facebook equivalent of Twitter (an underwhelmingly simplified description). I am not a fan of Meta but I'm a fan of competition in any market so even though I have no plans to use Threads I'm glad it exists as yet another option to prevent one single platform from being "the" platform.
But.... Do we really expect Threads users to make their Mastodon-type tweets even show up on Reddit-style Lemmy?
They'd only show up if someone on the instance started subscribing to them, if I have understood how that all works correctly. And who would do such a silly thing?
How about Lemmy.World?
The admins stated on Mastodon that they're not going to defederate until something happens. Knowing Meta they shouldn't give them the chance.
Here's the link: https://mastodon.world/@mwadmin/110654590632768079
Thats unfortunate. I'll be moving instances then. Giving Meta a chance is a lot like giving a mosquito a chance to not suck your blood.
Its like that story of the frog helping the scorpion cross the river.
How do you move? I signed up through .world but don't want a chance of touching the poo (meta).
You just make a new account with another instance. You get about the same content as before.
If you consume only - yes. if create something - not that easy.
"until something happens"
I suppose Metas history of actively being a bad actor working against societies best interests and enabling hate groups doesn't qualify as 'something'...
yeah that this point meta just existing is bad
Oh, looks like Iβm switching instances.
And done. I love federation.
How do you do that? I'm subscribed to like 50 conmunities. Would I have to start all over? That doesn't sound like it's worth it.
Just gonna name-drop the tool I made to do this :) https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
It's only been out a few days, let me know if you have any issues!
Thanks. I liked .world but no way will I let meta in.
Thanks for making this!
Awesome! I was hoping this would be possible. I plan to host my own instance hobbit.world and would need to migrate everything.
Also, I'll defederate any corporate instances. No need to encourage bad actors.
Honestly it isn't. Nothing about the Fediverse is private or inherently secure in that way. Everything is public. And you should assume that everything you publish through activity pub could eventually be looked at by anyone. If you want private or secure messaging there are non-activity pub open source secure alternate. In fact signing up for Lemmy there's even a field to enter for one. Whether or not a server federates with meta. Meta is still going to data mine the ever-loving shit out of all of them. The point is. None of us are at Meta's wim about being flooded with their toxic content.
Honestly I want to see meta flooded with our content. So much anti-threads anti Meta sentiment. Actual leftists. And not just make believe right-wing liberals who've been conditioned to think that they are left. It would be hilarious to watch Meta try to play wack-a-mole sanitizing everything. To please their reptilian corporate overlords. And if you don't care and just don't want to see it. You can always block them personally. Why let them data mine in peace. I say we make them work for it.
I'm not real sure how much the Threads Algorithm is going to pass through Mastodon content (and even less sure if it will even be able to pass through Lemmy content). I think the much more valuable aspect is you can pitch your Threads friends that they can move to the Fediverse and actually get to choose what content they see rather than which influencers paid Meta to fill up your feed.
Agreed about influencers. Meta wouldn't be doing this at all if they didn't have a plan (or multiple plans) to monetize it. The whole reason I left Reddit and plan to leave Twitter was that I very much dislike having any part of my online enjoyment at the mercy of the whims of gigantic corporate assholes that think they are far more important than they are. Meta has been an awful and abusive actor in the tech world, why would any freedom-loving person want anything to do with them in a freedom-loving space?! Why would anyone just wait and see what they do this time to decide they're an awful company with only their profits in mind and no qualms about making those profits at a cost to its users?!
It's not really about privacy, though. It's about the risk of Meta going "Embrace, extend, extinguish" on the fediverse, and the only way to protect against that is by not letting them interact with the majority of it from the get-go. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I would add to this that its not just the fediverse, anything you put on the internet should be assumed to be public and non-deletable. Even with GDPR and everything, if the host deletes everything there could dtill be backups, archives, or some random person, corporation, or government could backup everything. Use secure services like signal for things you want to be private and just assume everything else could be public forever.
Oh damn guess I will migrate to lemmy.ml and use that until I find out if lemmy.world defederates or not. (Edit turns out it is run by tankies and they are federated with lemmygrad.) While I may or may not stay on lemmy.world depending on if we federate with meta or not. I will no longer suggest Lemmy.ml.
I'm not in a hurry to migrate, as Threads doesn't support federation yet, but is not a bad idea to keep an eye on other instances.
Is mastodon.world the same as lemmy.world?
The admin is the same person, so is expected that they apply the same policy for both instances.
Be a lot cooler if they did.
I want to be on an instance that defederates, I will move if world does not do it.
The discussion is still on-going.
This is not particularly surprising. Lemmy was started as an anti-corporate project by leftists after /r/chapotraphouse got quarantined and later banned (subreddit for the most popular podcast and most donated patreon at the time), with the explicit goal of preventing corporate control from being able to silence leftists when they're blasting off. CTH was skyrocketing in subscribers at the time it was quarantined on August 8th 2019, and when even quarantining didn't stop its growth or slow down its activity afterwards Reddit pulled the plug under the excuse it promoted violence, but the only particularly edgy thing ever said there was "slave owners should be killed" and support for John Brown. This evolved post-ban into the assessment that Spez banned it because he wants to own slaves.
When that happened there was a massive shift in the leftist parts of reddit as we very quickly realised we'd be targeted if reddit ever deemed us to be too successful, and projects like Lemmy began in reaction. CTH's community in fact moved to Lemmy 3 years ago, and resides on Hexbear.net but has not yet joined the rest of federated lemmy due to technical issues (it used to be a fork with a different front end).
Given lemmy's specific anti-corporate origins seeing Lemmy.ml do this should surprise nobody. It's the correct move anyway.
Always love to hear the deep lore. Lemmyβs early development makes a lot more sense now. Good on them(you) to leave everything open and learn from Redditβs mistakes.
Still, free and open has a limit. No Facebook and no Nazis. Thatβs just common sense everyone used to have.
The paradox of tolerance is real, and a particularly thorny issue for social networks.
Philosophies that promote intolerance can not be tolerated by tolerant communities.
Lemmy.world needs to follow
Completely agree - If lemmy.world doesn't block very shortly I will move to a different instance.
https://fedipact.online/ is a list of instances that have pledged to preemptively block Threads. Includes my own instance (lemmy.name) among many others.
If they don't, I'm out
I mean, that's how federation ought to work right?
Though it's a bit of a shame that moving user accounts doesn't really seem to be a thing yet.
Has anyone heard any comments from them on this? Reconsidering my choice of instance unless they block threads.
100%
Fantastic news! Can we please do the same on lemmy.world? Please?
Yes please! No more power to evil corporations. I don't want my server to add interaction to them and help drive their agenda.
Didn't lemmy.world already block threads? I could swear I saw this post a while ago.
I don't think they have yet. @ruud@lemmy.world
I was planning to start a petition post, but wasn't sure where would be the right place to post it.
Edit: Someone did already! https://lemmy.world/post/1125293
It would be even greater if lemmy.world does it ;)
Make a poll, let the admins realize that their users don't want to federate with Meta.
We did yesterday, right?
I hope we do. And if we don't, I hope other instances block us.
mastodon.world has decided not to, so I don't think we will.
lemmy.world and everyone should as well
I did yesterday or so.
Same, performed the update to 0.18.1 and figured "well I'm already here so..."
I'll have no part in playing their game.
Back when I was a kid and got my first computer, I was mostly offline except for the occasional dial-up session. I didn't have much to do on the internet anyway and it was quite expensive. I remember being amazed the first time I have set up to meet a friend over ICQ, rather than a phone call, of being able to communicate with other computers from mine. It didn't matter whether these computers were at a neighbors' house, a different city or entirely different country. I was looking forward to the internet giving us ways to connect like never before. No barriers, just directly communicating and bridging cultural differences and whatnot. Little did I knew that this was just one phase, as the internet gets more and more segregated. Rather than connecting with people, it gives you the ability to filter out whatever you don't agree with, while staying connected with those who share your beliefs. It's like we are no longer living the same reality and can't even agree over fundamental things. I miss the old naive days of the internet when we feared viruses and the occasional pedophile in a chat room. Nowadays it's the possibility of spreading misinformation that could overthrow a government. Either having it going uncontrolled and unregulated, or having a private company in control of such power.
Personally, I think that this should be the choice of an individual user rather than the platform.
I am proud of Lemmy.ml for defederating. The second I find out if kbin social or lemmy world defederate or not I will just move to the other one since I use both. (Edit turns out Lemmy.ml is run by Tankies and also allows federation with lemmygrad.)
As a paid up lemmy.ml annual subscriber, I support this and am very happy with my choice. Good job guys.
Exactly. This is why federation is cool. The individual can choose where to go. Oh, kbin and lemmy.world, you didn't defederate from the corporate shills? OK then, I shall defederate myself from you. Plenty of instances.
The admins/devs are communists, they hate anything corporate related, so it's no surprise.
Based
Based
Tankies is a word that better suits them imo. I consider myself a socialist, but those guy are fucking defending the CCP (chinese comunist party) and are very trigger happy with the banning switch. So yeah, i dont think this is a win but more like bussines as usual.
As a paid up lemmy.ml annual subscriber, I support this and am very happy with my choice. Good job guys.
Dementia is hard
He paid for a server upgrade, he's gonna get his money's worth.
I mean this is probably a joke, but it's not really their fault, their client is likely malfunctioning.
Looking forward to Lemmy.world pushing the block button when it comes to itβ¦
Hard agree.
I don't really think federating with them is doomsday, tbh (though I go back and forth on this one), but that doesn't affect my primary reason for my nope. Threads consolidates everything I hate about corporate social media--and for that matter, all social media--without a single part I actually liked and made dealing with the other parts worth it. This is not a twitter clone; it's like someone asked chatGPT to create a social media network based on twitter for other chatGPT bots to talk to each other. For fuck's sake, it doesn't think its users should control what they see on their own feed.
I am perfectly willing--even eager--to perform melodramatically about things that annoy me in public for fun and when I'm bored and applaud others doing the same; it's fun times for all and possibly my favorite thing ever. This is not that.
Threads makes my skin crawl on concept. This is not 'they do not align with our values' because come on, Fediverse contains a multitude of values and invents more and i bet if asked, everyone here would list off a different set of values they believe encompass Fediverse and now I'm tempted to see because it would be hilarious. But we can't even get that far; Threads has no values. This would be a marriage of convenience to a real doll fueled by Facebook's algorithms and sponsored by Wal-Mart; whether or not it's a danger to Fediverse shouldn't even have come up because the first question that should be on anyone's minds is 'wait, this is actually a serious question?' and have been answered 'lol of course it's a joke, I just forgot to add the /s'.
I'm still waiting for that /s.
I've actually just asked that in another post, because I am kind of interested in what people see as Fediverse main idea.
But, thanks for this summary of how Threads looks like, since I'm avoiding it like a plague. You seriously can't even select what content you see? Fuck, that's way worse than I though - that's so obviously a ML model manipulating with people without holding anything back. I hope they've at least done something with the misalingment where it seems to just radicalize people to keep them on the platform, because if not, the world is fucked.
I hate Meta so much...
I think defederating from them is a no-brainer for the fediverse, but who am I? Just a user of the fediverse. I do not own an instance. I choose the fediverse over meta and its facebook crap, so for me it's a no-brainer. For owners of instances, maybe it isn't such an easy decision. It costs money to run an instance, for example. Federating with the Facebook corporate goons at first will seem useful to some instances, especially the big ones that want to stay big and general. When the big and general ones that fall for Meta's scheme to take control of things, the smaller instances on the fediverse that chose to defederate will be there to join.
I've been thinking on that and assuming fosstodon and lemmy.world both agree to defederate with Threads, I'm going to go ahead and set up regular donations. I only use DW a few times a year, but I renew my premium membership every six months and it's not cheap. I want to keep supporting it because its model does not include ads at all (premium gives you lots of icons, too, and I used to be a huge icon person, so I can't say that's not a consideration). Unless I lose my job or something, I'll keep paying until death or dw closes whether I ever use it again; it's worth supporting.
I was already considering it--when i joined mastodon I bought their stickers to show my appreciation--but this is been a wake-up call. If lemmy.world decides to federate, I mean, I'm not going to leave, but I am going to email lemmy.ml about why my application is still pending and use that for my primary.
It's not about Zuckerberg, it's about the userbase. With something that grew to 30 million users literally overnight, it's impossible to determine what it will be like, and how it will mesh with the existing fediverse content/users.
With something this scale, it only makes sense to secure and observe - pre-emptively block, watch the content, maybe even poll the users on what should be done. There is nothing to be lost this way, it's only a cautious approach towards a potential later link.
What could be lost is the Threads community overwhelms the lemmy community before there is a chance to react (it is 1000x bigger, after all). It makes sense to be cautious, here.
This isn't inconveniencing anyone, any user can make an account on Threads as well and use both right now.
If I wanted to see facebook shit I would use facebook, I stopped using whatsapp when it was bought by facebook, I don't want to see their content overwhelming the fediverse, that's why I'm here instead of there.
Fun thoughts and all but that isn't the reason why they're blocking it. It's because Facebook is bad. Corporation, big, embrace, expand, extinguish, evil. Plenty of explanations around about why these blocks happened. However you're also right. If it were very small like a 15k people instance and it didn't carry corporations inside maybe they'd consider not blocking.
I don't think threads actually has 30 million users. They have some paid shills, probably a lot of their own bots, some people who legit joined to see what it was about, and a bunch of Instagram users who had accounts created automatically. I'm not positive about the last point but if you can't delete threads without deleting Instagram then I'm sure they're going to leverage their Instagram userbase as much as possible here.
Look, Mark has royally screwed up Facebook. Any respect or honor with the guy has long been lost. Why even give him a second chance when it's obvious he's going to do the same thing with Threads?
His Metaverse failed. His Facebook/Meta thing failed.
He is a huge red alert to be involved or close to the very things we're trying to recover and escape to from things he has contaminated. Why chance associating with him?
Also consider Embrace Extend Extinguish, he is using federation purely as a resource to stand on
Ideologically, de-federating an instance just because you don't like the guy running it would be a bad thing, but Facebook/Meta has been just so toxic to the internet as a whole it's hard to really find fault with it.
My concern is less Suckerburg as much as Meta's corporate history. My expectation is that they'll try to use this to conquer and destroy Lemmy.
Ideologically, I find more fault in inviting meta to the playground than locking them out. They are the very definition of an evil corporation and no good can come of it.
I thought the whole ideology of the fediverse was to get away from corporationl influence. So I'd say this is very much true to the ideology as well.
Yup.
Facebook has been around for almost two decades.
This is not some unknown guy - we know exactly what Facebook's business strategy and ethical and moral conduct looks like.
Iβm actually shocked by the growth of threads, I underestimated how much people donβt care about their digital privacy.
You are using a social network on some random dude's server.
That is very true, but I have a little more trust in this random dudeβs server where he gets access to what? He sees my IP address? Than a corp that collects an unnecessary amount of user info for the sole purpose of keeping you locked into their apps with little disregard for health. While also pimping your info out to any persons with $2 to their name.
Any random person is at least a hundred times more ethical than mark Zuckerberg.
Those are existing Instagram accounts.
What they donβt know will hurt them, sadly.
Bravo lemmy.ml! We should follow the example!
Agreed. Ruud has done a lot of great things for .world in its short time, but I don't agree with his decision on this... I do hope he changes his mind.
There's no need to "give Meta a chance," they've already demonstrated who they are time and again. And I don't want to end up having to leave .world in the future because the traditional Fediverse split in two, and .world is on the wrong side of it.
how about making a poll on lemmy.world asking how we feel about defederating from metatrap, just to see...
Waiting for others to follow.
They'll be devastated when they find out my closed instance with 2 users, 1 of which is inactive, also pre-emptively de-federated them. I shudder to think they'll ever recover.
Hey bud, be the change you want to see in the world!
I do try to be
Is there an advantage to hosting your own instance?
I already owned the domain and have access to a server with more than enough resources, so it didn't have a downside to me.
Upside, I don't really have to worry about anyone else's federation choices. Undesirable content like loli/shouta stuff doesn't appear at all, because I'm basically the only user and don't subscribe to anywhere that exists so it doesn't federate to me anyway. My instance never lags because nobody but me uses it. Sometimes it misses comments through federation from overloaded instances, but it seems like the newer version of Lemmy has helped that greatly.
For me, yes. My instance is considerably faster and has better uptime than any of the instances I have created accounts on. Mostly because I'm the only one using it.
Yep, while other were complaining about issues it was smooth sailing for me.
On the flip side, discovering new communities is a pain, and whenever i subscribe to a new community it can take hours to start populating comments.
Honestly, not really.. But, it does put you in control over your destiny.
I don't know. I would like to subscribe to someone on Threads from Mastodon (since both are Twitter alternatives), if they don't have Mastodon account (which let's be honest they probably don't). Zuck does not get any of my data (besides what's available publicly anyway). If Threads decides to go full EEE, I'll stop getting updates from people on Threads, same as I don't get updates from people on IG right now. I think proliferation of ActivityPub protocol would be the greatest advantage.
Moreover, I think we should follow the email architecture - I might use i.e. Proton Mail, but it does not prevent me from sending emails to Gmail, which I think is a bad provider, who collects a lot of user data. In fact if Proton Mail forbade sending email to Gmail I would be really displeased about that.
The goal is to allow people to choose where they want to go and ActivityPub is what can help with that, unlike blocking Threads.
i ONLY want to conter your argument with email and activityhub: on email people choose to send stuff to a very limited amount of people except maybe newsletter and scammers. with threads, which should have already multiple times of osers compared to the fediverse, will flood the content to /all. Of course there are cool people but i think the entire fediverse culture will be blown away by threads in an instand. And with their weird moderation (especcially small) servers here will have large problems trying to moderate it
but by email there is no mass broadcasting to the public so it does not need to be moderated
I couldnβt agree more. Racing to block Threads when itβs completely unclear if Threads will even actually ever federate and what the implications of them federating will even be seems incredibly short sighted. Imagine how much innovation would have been lost on the internet if web server admins raced to block Google Chrome from accessing their content because they have some personal beef with Google.
Very good news. Between Pi Hole and uBlock Origin, any links to threads is already blocked on my computer. Nice to see you folks preventing the linking to this privacy invading boil of the internet
When companies like META show you how ruinous they are the first dozen times, over and over without end, you believe them, and you defend yourself, or you deserve every bad thing that's going to happen to you, when they repeat their corporate driven ends at your expense
Happy with this.
Yes.
I'm on the fence here. Luckily, at least, I think community/subreddit-based sites like Lemmy/Reddit don't have "network effects" that are as "sticky" as Mastodon/Twitter, because with Lemmy/Reddit you don't need to build up a follower list to start getting value. You just join the community and it's as if you immediately "followed" a bunch of people who share your interests. You don't even need to make an account - you can just bookmark a community and lurk, and maybe you eventually make an account to start interacting. It's a great "on-ramp" - very low barrier to entry/usefulness.
I think that's why Lemmy was able to take off so fast. It relies on community-level coordination, rather than every individual user having to make their own choice to switch, and try to get all their followers/followees to switch. So even if Meta did add a community-style mode, I don't think it'd eat into the Lemmy userbase. It is hard to be sure though, and I respect the choices of those instances that have blocked/defederated.
Mastodon admins have a harder decision to make I think - there's an opportunity to get very quick growth by effectively adding a lot more followable users/content. A bunch of people don't like Meta/Facebook, but want to follow their friends, and so they may use Mastodon to do that, which could get a lot more people to move to "real" fediverse apps/sites like Mastodon. I know a lot of people that are on Threads now, and I'm looking forward to being able to follow them from Mastodon, rather than being forced to get Threads to keep up to date with what they're working on.
No fences up my ass here, I didn't jump so quickly to lemmy to be immediately joined to fucken Facebook. Like. At all. I'd bet a quick poll would speak loudly
I seriously doubt this is a good faith effort by meta to be a part of the fediverse. Give this article a read. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
kev should've accepted the meeting to see if they could infer the intent...
Well done. I hope more of the fediverse follows suit. Facebook has a long way to go to restore trust -- if that's possible at all. They're nowhere near that threshold yet.
Personally I donβt think there is anything they could do gain trust short of undoing their data harvesting. Which would destroy them as a business entity/platform.
There's no way to build, let alone restore, trust with that kind of business model. All behavior manipulation companies need to die. Their mere existence is unethical.
Lemm.ee intends to do the same βIf Threads ever becomes interoperable with Lemmyβ
Per β Admin Post
(Apparently) Unpopular Opinion: I think defederating Threads is the wrong move, because it just locks people into Threads. If people on Twitter had the ability to move to Mastodon AND still interact with all the people they did before, I think we would have seen even more people move. The only reason I still check twitter at all is because I have a few close friends who didn't move. Meta is likely going to have big adoption of people who aren't ready to go to Mastodon, but are interested in getting out of the dumpster-on-fire that twitter seems to continue to be. But blocking those people from being able to join the more popular Lemmy instances, given no actual policy violations, just will keep people in Meta that otherwise could leave. With the "however" being: It's not quite clear to me that Threads users will be interacting with Lemmy as much Mastodon, if Threads were a Reddit replacement, it's more directly connected.
The problem isn't with the user base. It's with Meta and their business practices. People very simply do not trust Meta or Facebook and with good reason.
That's exactly it. Deleted my Instagram account when I learned they signed me up for a Threads account automatically. Haven't used Insta in years, but Mark says I have to have a Threads account. So Fuck Zuck.
Threads got 80 million users in 48h. Those people are not gonna use Mastodon anyway. They don't care about their privacy, they don't care that some proprietary algorithm is gonna decide what they will see, they don't care that it's Facebook. Those people have no standards. The only way we can help them is by educating them and if that doesn't change their mind, then there is nothing we can do, because freedom and privacy is not something they value. People who value them are capable of making a small sacrifice of not using some website when an alternative exists.
Facebook either just wants to use the Fediverse for their own benefit or they want to destroy it before it becomes a bigger competitor. We shouldn't risk all that we have built just because we live in an ignorant society that doesn't understand technology.
Fully agree. It would be like saying people with @gmail addresses can't email people on @someFederated.com email addresses. Also I think (and correct me if I'm wrong here) the idea of "defederating" gives power to some in a way we hated reddit admins having power. Suddenly it's "totally the fediverse except when...".
Imo fuck that. If I don't like threads I won't use threads the same way if I don't like lemmy.someinstance I won't interact with lemmy.someinstance. leave it open and let the users choose. But also let's educate. Some will listen and some will roll their eyes. But it's a choice.
Being the "Ban Happy" socal media is a bad thing and an even worse reputation.
I debate if its a good thing to let FB just have free content with asterisks as I have no idea whitch way the cup of users will spill
EDIT: FB is a parisite that has a small enugh heart to use agressive tactics like Embrace Extend Extinguish, be careful if we do let them in and always be ready to shut that door)
Another thing, lemmy.ml, reddit, twitter, (tiktok for good mesure) as well as Facebook and sons (and likely more) have sensorius admins, moderating above what most users want and warping conversations to pretend like "this is what people are saying online and nothing more nor less". To be overly flippant: "lol problem child blocked other problem child"
either way, do what you think is right,
I understand your viewpoint but you have to realize meta/Facebook has done this before. The best solution to protect Lemmy/mastodon in the long run is to cut the cancer out before it has a chance dm to spread.
When you cut off a cancer, it dies. When you defederate a social network orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than you... it doesn't even notice and continues to thrive.
This isn't going to harm Threads or protect Lemmy.ml.
I agree with you on all of that, though I have a feeling that itβs overly idealistic and optimistic
There we go. Not the wishy washy mastodon non-announcement. Although I understand their "neutrality" too, it's still like they wanna seem like the big boys. Sometimes it's advantageous to be small. This "fuck you" may be just adorable to Zuck, but it's also genuine.
Good news! Fuck Zuck!
Every time I see his face it looks like it's a photo shop to make him look bad but it's his actual face
we need photoshopbattles on lemmy!
My instance as well as the other Lemmy and Mastodon instances on this list have blocked Threads.
Can someone ELI5 this situation to me? Not sure what Meta can do to instances/the Fediverse.
People are worried that they'll embrace, extend and extinguish it. That is, join the fediverse, make Threads a better client than any of the existing ones until everyone uses their client, then use that extra reach to harm the fediverse.
I'm personally not that worried, because of who we are. We're a bunch of geeks with anarchist leanings, and so probably wouldn't switch to Threads anyway.
Please remember the example of Microsoft and open source office document formats. And in the early days of Internet Explorer with HTML. The risk here is that Threads will embrace the fediverse for a bit. Then they will incorporate features that are only available in Threads that will bleed users away from the open source options. All the while vacuuming up user data for profit while having distain for user privacy. Why would we want to allow them to cast aside the privacy for only one of our users? Are we not going to act like stewards for open source and protection of user privacy?
This us exactly the threat. They'll start setting standards that other instances will be pressured to follow. Those standards will be ways to control the fediverse and make it a propietary data-gathering and sales/advertising platform just like everything else.
I am worried because I want and we need non geeks to be on lemmy as well for it to be great.
Yes. Diversity of thought is great. We can enjoy our nerdy echo chambers, but in the end we get outvoted IRL. We need to both know what's going on in the larger world, and we need some way to help educate. This theoretically allows the best of all worlds.
Conversely, I don't trust Facebook.
Yeah, I enjoy a ton of hobbies where a lot of the people that know their stuff aren't particularly computer savvy. If they're not on my platform because it is too technically complex, I'm probably going to at least visit the more walled off platforms (not usually a fun experience).
You think we can't get people to join lemmy unless our Genius Daddy Savior Zuck brings them in?
Maybe? But a lot of people have exited reddit over the last month. Maybe not the average user but not the most hardcore geek anarchist either-they weren't on Reddit to begin with. Then there are the obvious reasons that a lot of people have left Twitter an those are the same type of people leaving reddit. So mastodon is probably more at risk than Lemmy but I don't think for a second that meta would not throw together a Lemmy competitor if they smell any money whatsoever in it.
Either way you run risks simply by interacting with threads, even if you interact accidentally. Their entire business model is to suck every last piece of data out of you that they can so they can sell in every way they can possibly think of to monetize it.
Since lemmyworld has no intention of blocking them I'm finding another instance to move to. Better safe than sorry with a company that has a horrific record on every single issue. And that way if they federate then back out, I won't be losing anything because I'll have never seen that content to begin with.
The will federate, try their best to suck as many users from fediverse as possible into threads, then defederate and become a walled garden again.
As for how they will suck users away:
They will start setting standards that other instances will be pressured to follow. Those standards will be mechanisms to control the fediverse and make it a data-gathering ad & sales platform.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
This is what people want to avoid. Meta is a bad actor, they intend on making their presence ubiquitous so people end up relying on it for their internet experience.
Y'know how you need a Facebook account to sign up for all sorts of things now? That's what people want to avoid happening in the fediverse.
It's simple really. If something as large as Facebook federates, you will never be able to know whether the users you are engaging with are actual people somewhere, and not just large language models.
It's happening on reddit right now. The only value to this sort of website is engaging with actual people.
If I wanted to talk to a chatbot, I can already do that. Meta has proven again and again that it will manipulate it's users with insidious content and moderation, and will knowingly harm users, such as by selling user data to foreign governments or deliberately fomenting depression and anxiety in its users, even kids.
I mean, they can turn it into total shit like they did with Instagram and Facebook.
I mean, if Lemmy.world doesn't when they decide to try and move in, I'll just move on to the next site that does. Prolly Lemmy.ml
Sweet action! After hearing about Lemmy.world not doing the same i'll be switching instances. It's great that I can make that decision.
I'm pretty conflicted about this I gotta say.
You shouldn't be. These companies are not here to play along, but dominate. Just like reddit played along with 3rd party developers until it didn't need them anymore, so will Meta use the openess of the protocol to ultimately undermine it.
Good call, guys. No more Zuck.
How does that work? Is threads using a protocol compatible to lemmy? (And I fully agree with the preemptive blocking of any facebook stuff).
Edit: thanks for all the detailled answers.
So Facebook tries the old EEE - Embrace Extend Extinguish. 1.A big company is Embracing an open source standard ("we're friendly, see?) They get a lot of users that way - even the open source savvy types. 2.they start Extending that standard "to make it even better" - but not talking about these changes with the rest of the community first. They cannot react quickly enough and become incompatible with the new version of this standard. 3.Extinguish. When all the users are effectively using the big companies platform with something that isn't the original standard anymore they change it so much that it isn't compatible at all anymore or replace it completely.
Threads is using the protocol that the entire fediverse is using, called ActivityPub. The protocol allows for lemmy instances to communicate with each other and with other sites like kbin and mastodon. What lemmy.ml did is called defederation, so threads can't communicate with lemmy.ml. This is to prevent meta/Instagram/Facebook from killing ActivityPub in the same manner Microsoft, IBM, and Google has killed open source protocols in the past.
Yes. Threads wants to use the ActivityPub Protokoll. We can interact with Kbin and Mastodon users thanks to this Protocol. The fear is that they use their huge user base to change the protocol to their liking (basically take control over the ActivityPub) and everyone who wants to stay federated with them and their users has to adapt those changes until the day they will simply cut everyone off.
I don't generally judge people based on their appearance, but this man's face gives me the heebie-jeebies. There's something alienating about the lack of affect he seems to have, plus his features seem to be an approximation of a human face - the mouth is too small, the ears too big, the forehead too shiny...
He looks like an AI image that managed to crawl out of the screen like the kid from The Ring
All the faces on This person does not exist are more believable than any picture of the Zucbot.
Forgive my ignorance but how is Threads part of the fediverse? How did .ml defederate it?
Threads announced they are going to open up an activitypub interface to federate
Preemptively is the word
Excellent news!
Oh, but not the first largest Lemmy instance?
Hmmm... I wonder who that could be...
Good ππΌ
Can y'all stop using this goblin as the thumbnail? Thanks
So that settles it. We have an option if meta federated and it goes to shit. Lemmy.world's stance is correct. Let's just see how this goes.
You don't wait and see how it goes with these sorts of things. They will destroy the community before you can take action and it'll be too late. They will do their best to destroy the fediverse and privatize it. They can't buy it like they usually do with competition, so they'll ooze their way in, contribute bullshit to the project, create new proprietary functionality that only works on their instance, convince everyone all the other instances are broken, and walk away with all the users. You don't invite vampires into your house.
Not sure what to think of this honestly. Like imagine a small email provider decided to block Gmail, that's a death sentence. It's impossible to get people to switch apps when they have to leave behind all of the content and people they used an app to interact with. And let's be honest, threads is going to run at a loss for a long time to grow their userbase before they start pulling weird shit. We need to have a migration path when that happens, and if threads is blocked everywhere, people will lose their content and contacts upon switching, so they won't do it.
I consider email (and snail mail) a significantly more essential service than social media. Email service providers starting to block each other is much more likely to have a negative effect on my life than being disconnected from some friends, influencers or current news
Gmail doesn't use an algorithm designed to make you depressed and lead to a higher rate of suicide among teenagers. Facebook and Instagram does. And Meta knows it did since day one of implementation.
The difference is that the email protocol has long been established and any new email client is built to that protocol standard. What we have here is an open protocol still being developed. The fear is that FB will force changes into that protocol and take it over. Then it will no longer be an open development protocol. By expunging FB right now before they get a firm grip on the userbase it can preemptively prevent FB from causing damage.
We are kind of in unexplored territory right now. You could compare it to google/MS taking over xmpp but it's not quite the same situation either.
But the reality is that the current fediverse doesnt need facebook to be successful. It already has the users to continue to grow. By combining user pools facebook would have the majority share with their instagram users which means they would have a controlling share of users and would leach users away from the fediverse over time until they broke away at which point fediverse would die as most users would be forced to follow in order to keep their feeds.
This way those feeds never mingle with FB and thus fb cant leech them.
I see where you're coming from, but you're underestimating scumpanies like Meta et. al. https://infosec.pub/post/400702
In an ideal world, your suggestion might work. Unfortunately it will fail in practice. How are we to determine when it's not too late to migrate?
Personally I don't care for those users. If they want to blindly follow their piper, let them. But I don't want that cancer ruining more OSS.
That's why it has to be done now - before we rely on them for content.
This isn't email or LinkedIn, it's not about who's on it - it's about content and the community
If we join with them, we'll get way more content and a way bigger community - not a better one though.
We need enough, and we need organic growth. We don't need a firehose, and definitely not one held by the people who made social media what it is everywhere else
I would agree if we were talking about another centralized social media site, bit I'm here to escape the interface of sites like Facebook.
I spent the last few days almost literally under a rock and... what the hell is Threads and why is it everywhere?
What were you doing to almost literally be under a rock? I'm intrigued
Meta's Twitter clone. The smart thing they did was convert over Instagram accounts, so there's a ton of semi-famous people on already. It's got a ton of attention in the past two days, just for being Twitter sans Elon.
Facebook equivalent of Twitter (an underwhelmingly simplified description). I am not a fan of Meta but I'm a fan of competition in any market so even though I have no plans to use Threads I'm glad it exists as yet another option to prevent one single platform from being "the" platform.
I immediately created an account.
But.... Do we really expect Threads users to make their Mastodon-type tweets even show up on Reddit-style Lemmy?
They'd only show up if someone on the instance started subscribing to them, if I have understood how that all works correctly. And who would do such a silly thing?
Its a .net? Is that going to be a more expensive top level domain now?
HARD agree. Let's make this happen!
lemmy.ml4lyfe.
Is this a new instance?
Damn zucc looks about as alien as ever