President Biden is now posting into the fediverse

fediverse_report@lemmy.ml to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 370 points –
President Biden is now posting into the fediverse
theverge.com
107

false alarm it's only threads

Threads

No he isn't.

I was excited for nothing...

Even if he was, why would this excite you? Whenever something goes mainstream, enshitification begins.

The obscurity of the Fediverse is not its defense from enshittification. The fact that it's so easy to move from server to server is.

If lemmy.world enshittifies, you can just move to lemmy.sdf.org without a big loss.

I think that lemmy could use more people.

Exactly! How do people not understand this yet? The decline of platforms isn't magic, it's very predictable and lemmy's core design is specifically meant to counter it. Think, people!

^/s^ no actually badness is directly proportional to the amount of users that's why the internet went to shit the moment more than 2 people connected

Enshittification comes from the profit motive, not from how popular something is.

I thought the white house actually runs their own mastodon instance when I read the headline. That would mark the point where mastodon reached mainstream use which is an incredible milestone.

Don't really care much for what Biden has to say at this point, but I'd prefer if various government orgs would all host their own instances. I don't want to go to a privately owned company to know about road construction or ballot box locations.

If so, I misunderstood this and thought it was for Threads and I stand corrected.

Nah. It’s threads. I’m pretty sure most fediverse instances blocked threads.net before they even tried to federate. I know mine did.

mastodon.world didn't

Neither did Mastodon.social or Mastodon.online, though honestly I'd recommend people steer clear of those instances when signing up for a different reason, they're also very widely blocked or limited by a lot of servers due to issues with spam and moderation. Ironic that these instances are already too big to effectively moderate, yet threads is bigger and also way worse (see link in other comment about their moderation issues) and yet people still want to federate with them.

Well for one thing it's nice to be able to follow someone's threads account without having to install that crap on your phone.

I don't really see the point since the federation is one-way (at least last time I heard), so you can't reply to anything as it never gets sent back to threads. You'd be better off just following it as an RSS feed if you really want it (There are unofficial tools to do that for threads and it might be officially available in the future).

I wasn't aware it's one-way, thx for informing me on that.

Mastodon instances need to defederate.

If you want to comment on any POTUS posts with the broader user base, you have to download Threads. Fuck that noise.

Don't you love how the government is supporting private for-profit businesses? I received an amber alert 2 days ago and when I clicked the link it took me to Twitter. I don't have a Twitter account and the page wouldn't load. What in the actual fuck? Our government is using a website run by an insane man-child for critical infrastructure.

That’s just the link the local cops pasted into the alert form. They can put in a link to hampsterdance.com if they wanted to.

My point is that they should have a dedicated public service website that they use for these sorts of things.

Your state or county is probably using what was identified as an easy and accessible solution several years ago. It was probably selected because it was something any yahoo could easily access and post to.

Now that there are a lot of cheap and easy FOSS alternatives, it probably wouldn’t be too hard to petition for a ballot initiative that required these alerts to be published on a state masto instance or something.

The sooner they use the fediverse the better

I had a conversation with a friend from the US (I'm not, he's from Like the New England area idk where exactly), he's very conservatist, like the typical "I own a guy gun and I like it" type of person (lucky that he doesn't base his entire personality on it), and even he said that both options sucked ass and very much envied that most of the European countries have a sensible system of voting that has more than two parties, since when one sucks go to the another, and the possibility of all candidates being absolutely trash is basically zero when you got like 7+ parties, compared to the two in the US

If y'all had a functioning government and something that resembles capitalism (a few leading members while everyone else gets fucked around, sounds similar? cough Meta, Google, Microsoft cough and others) and had some competition it would go all way different than it's currently going

There's also a limited federation mode that server admins can use. Users and posts are still searchable, but they do not show on the public federated feed.
Useful for this exact case where a server may have beneficial accounts, but the rest should be hidden for moderation reasons.

Still would prefer it being on a proper mastodon server, but I can live with this. Whatever server ends up hosting a President's account now has to deal with record preservation laws for their posts. Let's leave that bureaucratic stuff to threads.

how about having the American government just host their own fediverse servers? it's not like they don't have the money to do so

And some usenet servers too while they are at it.

I mean, it's not like he's reading the Threads users' comments either.

That would be like Gmail blocking Yahoo, it defeats the purpose of a Fediverse especially when users can already block content from domains they dislike.

No, big corp with millions of users they cannot moderate defeats the purpose of a fediverse.

First of all, no it doesn't. The fediverse is about servers communicating with each other, that doesn't mean all servers, it just means that multiple servers communicate, and if a server is being problematic it will be blocked or limited, as another example a good amount of servers limit or block Mastodon.social and due to spam issues. Threads in this regard is no different, it just so happens to be a much bigger problem than Mastodon.social hence why there is much stronger efforts to defederate it.

especially when users can already block content from domains they dislike.

No, you are deliberately or unintentionally misrepresenting how domain blocks and indeed blocking in general works in Lemmy (Domain blocks target communities and do not hide users or their content), and even with Mastodon this doesn't solve the biggest problems with threads, that being the extremely poor moderation and the EEE threat which are server wide problems and not user preference issues.

Dark Brandon would host his own instance, and make it all about chocolate ice cream.

Just a totally straight blog about ice cream and cool cars, with no mention of politics.

On behalf of the dozens of us here…. Welcome Joe!

Ah it's Threads...

Good that it's fedi, bad that it's threads. They definitely have the resources to run a government Mastodon instance, but no let's stay beholden to the tech companies 😑

And none of them appear to have joined Bluesky yet, a competing decentralized social network running on its own AT protocol that recently opened general signups.

good.

I’d rather have them on Bluesky/AT than Threads, to be perfectly honest…

Neither is good

Eh, from what I could gather from both specs ATProto does address some shortcomings of ActivityPub, so the idea has some technical merit. While a lot of the current Fediverse seems to have settled on AP, it’s not like it’s the be-all and end-all of federated protocols either.

Maybe you’re just talking about the company behind it?

AT does have some advantages, but I strongly prefer the whole philosophy behind AP.

And yes, bsky doesn't really inspire me with confidence.

Whats wrong with bluesky? I hear this general sentiment about it but have never even looked at it.

I believe, people are mostly annoyed that Bluesky started yet another (half-baked) standard, rather than throwing their weight behind ActivityPub.

This would be fine, if they were decidedly a for-profit company, but their whole branding is that they want to benefit humanity.

It's also weird that the former CEO of Twitter is involved.
The guy could have pushed Twitter into that direction, but apparently, he needed a separate project to have this change of heart.

Like, I don't know, they've got some things that look alright:

  • They've open-sourced some things.
  • It's legally a Public Benefit Company.
  • They've got the creator of XMPP on board, so that at least makes it credible that they genuinely want to come up with a better protocol.
  • Their CEO is a techie.

But yeah, I'm still worried, it ends up being a bait-and-switch. Make it all look good for now and once enough users have signed up, slowly transition to just becoming yet another Twitter.

aaah ok yeah that makes sense.

Also, I love that I was downvoted for even asking why I should hate another website instead of blindly hating it. Never change reddit 1.3

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They also have Paul Frazee, who is the Beaker Browser dude and one of the Secure Scuttlebutt dudes. And also whyrusleeping, one of the IPFS dudes. So if they manage to enshittify it won't be because they forgot to hire enough "Wizard Utopians" with decentralization experience.

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It's run by Jack. The same Jack, founder of Twitter that was at the helm while Twitter went to shit before Musk got it. I know Musk era has been really bad, but it was getting really bad under Jack. I wouldn't trust a social network run by him or Musk or Zuck.

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Joe can’t see your welcome message. Threads can’t see content posted outside of Threads. It can only spam masto Instances, and if you want to comment, you need to download Threads.

sigh So Threads can throw their posts out into the fediverse, but no one from fediverse is allowed to post comments back? Why am I not surprised? 🙄

For an account like this, who cares? It’s a one way flow of PSA type announcements anyway, not like Biden or his team would engage.

If I want to start a discussion about one of those posts, I’d do it on lemmy somewhere I suppose.

You can comment just fine. Threads users just can't see it yet.

If you think that he personally goes anywhere near this I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya...

All of his social media accounts are handled by his PR team. He probably doesn't even know what's on them.

Genocide Joe

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Oh shit, now the feds watchin 👀

This account is now under the control of the Federal Cyber Crime Unit (FCCU) in accordance with a seizure warrant obtained by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California issued pursuant to 18 U.S.C. §§ 981 and 982.. Every user in this DM has been formally logged and will receive personal notice(s) in their mailbox. You are all to be investigated and it is of no use to block the receptian/contact. Please have patience as we will inform you of any further actions along with your case number. You are not to release this information online or further measures will be taken with harsher consequences.

That's @potus, for those on platforms that can view microblogs and that are not defederated from Threads.

Remember that comments are not federated to/from threads yet. If I understood correctly, likes are federated.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The official US president Threads account, currently helmed by President Joe Biden, has begun using Meta’s ActivityPub integration, making Biden the first sitting US president to post on the decentralized networking protocol.

The account turning on fediverse posting comes only a couple of weeks after Threads rolled out its beta ActivityPub integration for users in the US, Canada, and Japan.

Biden may not be able to see replies and follows as they pour in from the fediverse — and with some servers blocking connections to Meta, not everyone there will be able to see his posts — as those features weren’t part of Threads’ integration when it opened up beta testing last month.

So far, only Biden’s official POTUS account appears to have toggled Threads’ fediverse integration on.

Neither Dr. Jill Biden’s nor Vice President Kamala Harris’ accounts showed up in a search.

And none of them appear to have joined Bluesky yet, a competing decentralized social network running on its own AT protocol that recently opened general signups.


The original article contains 220 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 23%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I'm just waiting for the president of my country to start federating, then I can follow him from Mastodon and delete my Threads account.

I see it as a positive thing

POTUS puts the ‘fed’ in ‘fediverse.’

Thanks I hate it.

Also too bad that the White House has joined Meta, specifically, rather than the decentralized Fediverse, but libs gonna lib.

Would have been cool for them to host their own instance with just the one account

But open source software is communism! Much more on brand for the White House to go with Meta

Would make sense too, they don't use default Gmail either. Some other governments have Mastodon instances

Nah, give those National Parks posters a Mastodon account. Way more desirable than POTUS. Also put all those other random gov Twitter accounts on it so they can link somewhere that anyone can read.

Its a vague undulation in a direction I think most folks here would probably prefer?

That's kinda all you can realistically hope for a lot of the time

Funnily enough the instance my masto is on also uses that motto, tho for an entirely different reason

As if he knows how to operate a smartphone.

Calling him Genocidal of the United States (GOTUS) makes it sound like he is the only one, so i proprose Genocidal in Charge of the United States (GICOTUS)

At least go with Geoncider in Chief or something. It may not be a word, but it still feels grammatically correct.

#GenocideJoe

Some younger people like Geno Joe too!

#GenocideJoe #GenoJoe #GenocidalGhoul

Isn't it way past bedtime for you two in St. Petersburg?

Sorry i dont speak genocidalapologism

Honestly, I surprised you can form mostly to complete sentences.

On the other hand, im not surprised that the most basic facts surprise you