Fear, loathing, and excitement as Threads adopts open standard used by Mastodon

Ansgar@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 143 points –
Fear, loathing, and excitement as Threads adopts open standard used by Mastodon
arstechnica.com
23

Yeah, Threads can do all it wants. I've set a preemptive block. I want nothing to do with Threads. Of course, I cannot control what other instances decide to federate and get my content that way. But I won't make it easy for them.

What steps did you take to preemptively block it? I want nothing to do with Threads either but am a bit confused on what I should be doing. Is there a list of instances who defederated from threads or something?

I run my own instance so I simply added a block in the instance configuration. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say the folks at lemmy.world have most likely done the same.

No need to guess, just look at https://lemmy.world/instances

If anything was being blocked you would see it there. AFAIK lemmy.world does not normally block/defederate anyone as a standard policy (including threads.net).

If you want an example on the other end of the spectrum go see https://beehaw.org/instances they are currently at 405 instances being blocked including threads.net.

I don't think any Lemmy instance is going to have to block Threads.

Mostly because Lemmy doesn't support microblogging. Kbin does. And the big one is Mastodon.

All because ActivityPub is not a monolith, different services use different parts of the standard.

I appreciate that the article mentioned that Threads isn't federated and these claims often never materialize, because I feel like this is the most important fact, and it's barely discussed.

Threads is not federated. There's nothing to defederate from, and it's unclear if there ever will be.

All the benefits of embracing activitypub are provided by announcing adoption, and all the downsides only materialize by actually doing the hard part. Based on experience and logic I think federation will happen far, far in the future if ever.

All the benefits of embracing activitypub are provided by announcing adoption, and all the downsides only materialize by actually doing the hard part.

Well said. It wouldn't take much to convince me that this was their strategy all along.

Yeah, that's exactly what I think is the strategy.

If I were the VP or whatever in charge of this -- which means that I'm assuming I'm a dishonest corporate shill -- I'd create a roadmap to integrating activitypub that includes the very most basic functionality as the first deliverable, then any usability or UX features as round two deliverables. Then I'd tell the project manager to plan for an open-ended "assessment" period between completing round one and starting round two, and tell them to move on to other tasks until further notice,

IF they ever finish, you just announce that it's technically possible for someone on Mastadon to query the Threads server and vice-versa, but, like there's no way to actually find people on Mastadon servers in Threads or follow them, and vice-versa, and then leave it that way. And that assumes the project doesn't just get suspended at some point and left that way.

Is anyone maintaining a list of instances that have defederated Threads? I want nothing to do with them and am completely willing to hop to a different home if necessary to be sure of blocking them.

No instances have defederated, because no issuances have federated. Threads does not use activitypub, and is not a federated platform.

They've said they will in the future, but these people also say your privacy is safe and that they are serious about fighting disinformation and climate change.

Threads is not federated. It may never be. Anyone is free to plan preemptive action, but I'd like to squash this misunderstanding so everyone knows: none of your current instances are federated with Meta.

And I want to squash this misunderstanding so everyone knows: I want my instance to preemptively defederate. If they aren't willing to take this obvious step to protect users from Threads turning on federation without warning in the middle of the night, I'm moving to an instance that will.

Here’s a list of instances who have vowed not to federate with them if it happens.

I’m incredibly surprised that Wired (the original source) didn’t mention that there’s precedent for the fediverse’s concerns in Gchat/XAMPP

Because there aren't. That was a dumb blog post.

If Google Talk never supported XMPP it still would have had millions of users and XMPP would have died years earlier. That wasn't EEE, that was Google keeping an open protocol alive for a while until they decided not to.