As a long-time fediverse user, based on your description of the situation here, it sounds like you made a good decision. If and when they get a hand on their moderation issues you can refedederate. As you say current tools are minimal, and defederation is a very blunt tool, but it’s the only option in a situation like this.

Yep. Federation could conceivably respond to the EU's requirement for interoperability -- and they could do it in a way that puts a lot of barriers to people actually moving, so works well for them. Of course the EU would say that didn't meet the requirement, which would lead to a multi-year legal battle and eventually Meta would probably pay a billion dollar fine (as they routinely do -- it's just a cost of doing business) and promise to remove the barriers (which they wouldn't, and then there would be another multi-year legal battle).

But none of that works if the EU won't allow Threads for some other reason!

Still, my guess is that they'll figure out a way around the EU's objections to Threads ... we shall see ...

That just shows how little Eugen understands the privacy risks. Why just blocking Meta's Threads won't be enough to protect your privacy once they join the fediverse has an example of how federating with Meta can expose private data. And, data can be public but hard to discover (a profile for somebody who only makes followers-only and local-only posts); federating with Threads adds exposure.

yeah it's really disappointing.

Agreed that figuring out the right action is important! It's clear from the conversation so far that a lot of instances are going to defederate, and a lot of instances are going to federate, so any strategy needs to take that into account.

I talked with a lot of people about this when I wrote Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! and don't think it's the case that we share the same goals. Some people see increasing the size of the ActivityPub network as a goal in and of itself (and generally support federation); others are in the fediverse because they want nothing to do with Facebook or Meta (so unsurprisingly support defederation). And some people have a goal of communicating with people on Threads -- friends, relatives, celebrities, etc; others don't. So again, these different goals are something to take into account.

Wanting to stay federated DOES NOT mean the user wants to help Meta or thinks that Meta is here for our benefit.

That's correct, but many of the people I've seen arguing in favor of federation do seem to think Meta's looking for a win/win situation where the fediverse benefits as much or more than Meta. And conversely many would argue that wanting to stay federated means the user is helping Meta whether they want to or not.

Totally agree. Back in June I wrote about the reasons the FediPact was good strategy and started it with

Most importantly, it counters the gaslighting that resistance is futile. The segment of the fediverse that wants to reject Meta is clearly large enough that it will survive no matter what the big Mastodon instances and pundits do.

Yes, followers-only posts are public -- upvote if you agree!

💯. The mod tooling is virtually non-existent so there aren’t any other viable options

Good perspectives, I totally agree it’ll be a big challenge here as the fediverse gets bigger. Mastodon’s already had a couple of waves of spam - Brian Krebs had a good article a few weeks ago

Not at all. I talked about this in In chaos there is opportunity! Meta's potential arrival is a likely to be a good thing for the fediverse no matter whether or not they actually go forward with it.

Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! has plenty of perspectives from both sides.

Why is it stupid? The article isn't setting up the tension, it's describing the tension that exists.

No, followers-only posts are not public -- upvote if you agree!

There was an interesting pair of polls last summer about reactions to Threads and Tumblr. 66% of the respondents were either opposed to or alarmed by Threads federating, and only 10% were supportive. By contrast, only 15% were opposed to or alarmed by Tumblr, and 39% were supportive. It's just one data point but still interesting!

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/110663712542031369

I think we're in violent agreement here: getting the EU to drop their objections is certainly one way around them! So yeah, they'll probably try to use the demand for Threads to push back on the DMA's anti-trust-ish provisions (which as I understand is the current blockage). And then they'll try to use their ActivityPub integration to push back on the interoperability requirements, no doubt characterizing them as unrealistic. It's predictable but still irritating.

Right. And that's why I'm on blahaj.zone!

For many thought it's not that simple: they're okay with Meta housing hate groups as long as it doesn't directly lead to users on their instances being harassed. And it wouldn't surprise me that if harassment starts happening it'll still turn out not to be that simple for them because there are a lot more non-harassing accounts than harassing accounts

Exactly! Have you considered a career in politics?

Great writeup! A couple thoughts:

First & foremost, which is somewhat glossed over, is the notion that ordinary people will have the knowledge or interest in deploying their own Personal Data Servers. This isn’t really touched on from what I’ve seen in their documentation, despite it being touted as such a major benefit of the architecture.

Very true. There's a line buried in their white paper that "we expect that most users will sign up for an account on a shared PDS run by a professional hosting provider – either Bluesky Social PBC, or another company" but they very much do tout it as a major benefit. It's certainly true that the ability to move your data around is a very good thing, and something the fediverse is bad at today, so from a positioning perspective it makes sense to focus on this; their claims that this gives the user power are, um, exaggerated.

due to the high volumes of data involved, there are likely to be fewer Relays deployed instead of many.

Yeah I was in in a discussion where a Bluesky developer suggested that non-profits might run their own Relays ... seems unlikely to me, both because of the volume and because of the risk of potentially relaying content that's legal in whatever jurisdiction the PDS is in but not in the Relay's jurisdication. Of course Relays don't have to be for the full network, so we might see more smaller-scoped Relays (although I'm not sure how that differs from a Feed Generator), but if BlueSky and a few others provide the only full-network Relay, that's a pretty powerful position for them to be in.

Also in that conversation the said that AppViews are likely to be even more resource-intensive than Relays, and so anybody developing an AppView might as well have a Relay as well, so there's likely to be the same kind of power concentration.

That said I think it's very good that Relays explicitly appear in their architecture. Relays are also critical for smaller or less-connected instances in today's fediverse, but don't get a lot of attention.

Arguably this may make the AuthTransfer network no more decentralized (they go back & forth on describing their approach as decentralized and distributed) than the ActivityPub network is.

Yep. They've split the functions of the ActivityPub instance, but it seems to me that they've just shifted the power imbalances around, and potentially magnified them.

Very cool, glad you're back!

Yeah, the current thinking is just to have the one magazine for now unless people have good reasons why that won't work. Of course a lot depends on whether there are any active bugs federating between the two systems but I think right now things are copacetic.

It's a great point. This kind of legislative activism is frequently done in public on Twitter, Facebook, etc. as well so the risks are low in general but it's still something to make people aware of. It's a real contrast with anything that's direct action, where the fediverse is a non-starter.

It used to be a slang term people trying to sound hip would use, but that was many decades ago -- 1930s or 1950s I think.

Very good point, thanks much!

Not sure about the hashtags, good question. There will also be separate posts on Mastodon -- here's an early example, guaging awareness -- and it'll be interesting to see what gets traction where

That's right, as the article says

And from the perspective of the "free fediverse" that's not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is "a long way out" is encouraging. OK, it's not as good as "when hell freezes over," but it's a heckuva lot better than "soon."

Totally agree that we need a good privacy bill -- and if the proposed ADPPA consumer privacy moves forward again this year, we'll need to get involved on that to push to strengthen it (because last year's version had huge loopholes, including some that left LGBTQ+ people's personal data at risk).

It depends if I've turned on "approve followers" -- upvote if you agree!

Thanks, it's a good point!

Alas, that's par for the course. But, the email they receive gets counted (and they'll often run some kind of sentiment analysis software on it) and staffers pay attention to how much mail they're getting, so it still makes a difference!

Agreed, this is awesome. Love the suggestions about conventions.

I don't trust them either, and they're very likely to move ahead with federation anyhow. It still means something that they're changing the story that they're telling.

Nobody's talking about taking the choice away from others. Some instances are saying they'll federate with Threads, you're free to move your account there. Or as you say, people who want to hang out with the bully can download the Threads app right now!

Timely! Are you planning on doing kbin as well?

That's incorrect. Followers-only posts (and local-only posts on instances that have them) aren't public. Profiles that don't make public and unlisted posts aren't discoverable. And, as Threat modeling Meta, the fediverse, and privacy discusses, there are plenty of things that could be done to reduce the amount of data that's public.

Also, that's only one of the many reasons people oppose federating with Meta.

Yes, I certainly constructed the sentence to highlight the different reactions. Later in the article I say "And by prioritizing their desire to be embraced by Meta over queer and trans people's safety, Meta's cis advocates undercut their claims to be allies in ways that may be hard to recover from" -- which is true no matter what Meta does or doesn't wind up doing with Threads. Of course it's not the only thing going on, but I think it's important enough that it's worth highlighting.

You're right ... but tech has a lot of lobbying power and they are very very very strongly against a strong privacy bill, or even a bill that would regulate algorithms. So it's easier for legislators to pass something like KOSA -- or pass a weak privacy bill that will actually make the situation worse by getting rid of laws like California's -- and claim they're doing something.

It turns out that crossposting to Lemmy works better from Lemmy communities. So, a Lemmy community is useful. Since I had already crated the kbin magazine and there's no way to delete magazines (!), looks like we'll experiment to see whether or not having two of them makes sense. Here's the Lemmy community I created, I'm using it for now to cross-post from other communities so that there's a single place to go for everything. !bad_internet_bills@lemmy.sdf.org

Thanks!

That's true, although I've been saying all along that Threads' potential arrival is a great opportunity whether or not it happens.