It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:
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Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)
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Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)
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Defederate (wait and see)
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Defederate with the intention of staying defederated
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Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too
It’s all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.
In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?
I’m not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.
From what I gather, EEE only works if:
- Fediverse users mass exodus to Threads
- Meta extends ActivityPub Standard so much that other FOSS projects couldn’t keep up.
I feel like defederating would not solve 1. If 2 happens, the fediverse would just defederate anyway.
(Ofc we have to think about the privacy risks of federations etc.
Choice 2. 5 is ridiculous and more harmful to the fediverse than the worst case of EEE.
I frankly prefer options 4-5. There’s no evidence that Facebook will play nice and a lot of historical evidence that they won’t. I want to be on an instance willing to take the nuclear option if it comes to it.
We need to think this through from the standpoint of an instance admin who is trying to figure out how to use Threads to make their instance grow. That’s really the only motivation I can think of to federate with Threads. Otherwise it’s just all downside. As a corporate social media entity, they are entirely opposed to everything Lemmy stands for philosophically, and their scale is a massive threat to the culture and operations of the much smaller fediverse. Why would anyone ever want to federate with them? Because they see it as an opportunity. To ride the dragon, thinking it can be controlled. This is madness. Choice 4 all the way and if it becomes necessary, 5.
The beauty of the Fediverse is you do not need to make everyone else agree with you. It is important that mods know what you want; what you think other people should want is irrelevant.
No, you don’t need to go around making other people agree with you, on the fediverse or anywhere, really.
But if you are going to enter into a mutual risk/benefit relationship with another party, it does help to understand what their motivations are, so you can figure out if they’re going to line up with your own, or lead to conflict.
My post is about trying to understand those parties’ motivations. Not make everyone agree with me.
They already got millions of users. Depending how they’ll implement federation, the sudden influx of millions of unmoderated users into the fediverse might wreak havoc to small instances. So personally, I prefer no. 3, defederate (wait and see).
Only real threats of Threads federation are EEE and server overload. Not the people from there or privacy. If someone wants to see some content you don’t want to see, like some opinion you don’t like, they should be able to see it. I don’t understand why there would be such list, it would be pure censorship and waste of time. I have heard Threads has a pretty good moderation, so that solves this problem anyway.
I don’t get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
I don’t get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
Means the instance isn’t part of the hive mind and we obviously can’t have that!
I am a fediverse enthusiast and I am excited for Threads federating. I hope it incentivises Tumblr to federate also and then we actually finally have proper choice.
I see you’re not familiar with EEE. This is a classic move by enterprise to kill an open competitor.
I am. How could they kill the fediverse? If they tried to kill it, it would only return to how things was. Chances are tumblr could join in and then they couldn’t easily extinguish it.
Ever heard of XMPP?
If a single party participating in an open standard is large enough, they can go off the track, and then kill off interoperability.
But this isn’t a single party. Mastodon and Lemmy and Kbin are well established
I don’t get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
Site A hosts communities that serve vulnerable people. They see Meta as a threat to those vulnerable communities, as they are not well moderated, and have no issues with hate speech and harassment, so they defederate.
Site B federates with both Site A and Meta. They act as a pass-through for content from Site A to reach Threads.
Bad actors on Threads see content from vulnerable people on Site A and engage with it. People from Site A cannot see the bad actors on Threads doing this, but people on Site B do, and bad actors there get alerted to an opportunity to be proper shit stains. Now, vulnerable people on Site A get targeted by this induced harassment coming from Site B.
What does Site A do?
They defederate from Site B.
The question is just about whether they wait until the harm has been done or not.
Defederation is a one-way block of incoming traffic from the blocked instance. I’m on lemmy.world and can still see Beehaw content posted by Beehaw users even though they’ve defederated from lemmy.world, but if I comment on that content it will only be visible to lemmy.world users. Beehaw has protected its communities from lemmy.world commenters, but its content is still accessible by anyone for any purpose. Instances that federate with both sides don’t change this.
I’m looking at beehaw communities on both Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org,and they’re totally out of sync with each other. There’s the rare post from a beehaw user that breaks through somehow - possibly boosted from a kbin or Mastodon instance? - but for the most part, you’re getting basically none of the content from those communities.
Because beehaw isn’t sending you any updates.
Is it that you’re seeing beehaw users who are posting to communities hosted on 3rd party communities? Because that’s absolutely possible.
And that’s absolutely the issue with federating with sites that continue to federate with instances you’ve defederated from. You’re blocking direct communication in both directions, but there’s a lot of indirect communication going on.
Like, this is literally the scenario I described.
No, Beehaw users posting in Beehaw communities visible on Lemmy.world. There’s no third party interaction on either of those posts (just the Beehaw OP and Lemmy.world comments). Whether or not Beehaw is doing the convenience of sending updates, their content is accessible through Lemmy.world. It might take some action on a user here to trigger a pull, but it’s entirely possible and you shouldn’t expect defederation to prevent an intrusive instance from continuing to get content if they want it.
I don’t know for sure there isn’t some pathway through another instance causing this, but in my understanding that’s not how federated communities work. There’s the owner instance that has the true version of the content and distributes it around and then local copies on each other server that feed their updates back to the main instance. You wouldn’t ever take a third party’s version of a community because you couldn’t trust its legitimacy.
Everyone is talking about defederating preemptively because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. So, doing what any exec does, he looks for buzzwords and trends to make his new product more exciting. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
I agree. All the Fediverse is to the Silicon Valley firms is the current buzzword. Like you said; if- and to me, it’s a question of if and not when- Fediverse integration gets built into Threads, it’s gonna be limited. My bet is that somehow they’re gonna make it so that Threads instances can only federate with other Threads instances.
And that’s if it exists at all. I feel there’s a considerable chance that Meta just throws away the Fediverse integration idea. Either it’s too much effort for too little profit, or some new buzzword comes along for them to chase.
I’m starting to dislike the concept of ActivityPub. It gives power to the admins instead of to the users. Users should be able to decide what servers they connect to and what content they see. I hope another protocol like Nostr becomes more popular.
As an instance admin, lol.
I’m paying for the server. I’m handling all the maintenance, moderation, etc. You’re out of your mind if you think I’m gonna allow nazis or whatever other horrible shit is out there anywhere near my instance. I’m not going to enable bigotry. Fuck that.
Everyone can see my instance’s TOS as well as who I’ve defederated and why. If they don’t like it, they can find another instance. They’re not entitled to an account on mine.
It gives this power to anyone willing to shell out a fiver a month.
…and the know how to set up and maintain a server, which is beyond most
You can also use third party providers like these guys who can set up an activity pub centric website for you.
That looks like a pretty good starting point for people who have just a moderate understanding of servers and websites
Yeah that’s something I’ve not seen discussed here much. I get that people want control, but getting started with an ActivityPub centric site (like kbin) is now cheaper than ever. Get your own cheap hosting on a VPS and handle some traffic.
People can even create their own instances just to federate with everyone and absorb their content if they’re worried about the rules and regulations or “x server not connecting with y”
Overall I think it’s a pretty good system compared to a single silo like Reddit
I hate to say it but we already need a better Twitter and Reddit alternative than what the fediverse has to offer, then. Each time a big company comes in, the communities will get thrown into disarray, eat eachother, and generally make the original ‘vision’ of the fediverse smaller and smaller. People will use what is easy, not what is best for their interests (at least for the vast majority). The solution is still open source, community managed and driven content, but it doesn’t look like the fediverse is a long-term answer.
Would be funny, if major instances are choosing option 5, making many communities divided and useless, right before Meta announces, that they don’t plan on federating with Lemmy instances. And that Threads will only federate with Tumblr lol
Seriously tho, how will Threads impact Lemmy anyways? They don’t have communities there, right? Their posts will probably not show up here regardless of federated or defederated, if I understand correctly.
You can follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon.
But have you actually tried it? Here’s a sample. Go take a look. (EDIT: My link is worthless unless you are logged in to mas.to. Go look up username fediverse@lemmy.world in your Mastodon client of choice)
It’s a completely unmanageable firehose of comments, spewed only in chronological order.
Honestly, the link between incompatible types of social media like Lemmy and Mastodon could be severed in my opinion, because it’s mostly just novel with little benefit.
If 9 regular people sit down with a nazi without protest, you have 10 nazis. Threads will absolutely not stop nazis from posting nazi stuff. We know this because Facebook is full of nazis. Why would anyone want nazis at their table? Because they’re nazis. Anyone who wants to federate with Threads is a nazi. Do you want to federate with nazis? Option 5 is really the only way to keep the nazis away from the table. This is not an exaggeration. There are literal nazis given free reign on Facebook. There will be literal nazis given free reign on Threads. If you don’t stop the nazis because you want to interact with your friends who interact with nazis, you’re enabling nazis. Don’t enable nazis. I can’t stress enough they are literally nazis.
I get your point, but by the time I finished reading your comment my brain stopped registering nazi as anything more than a series of letters
4 is honestly my preference. I don’t see the need to defederate from instances that federate with Threads. But I do want to see a list of instances that federate with Threads so I can personally never comment or post there. I don’t like the idea of comments and posts I make being used to generate ad revenue for Facebook.
100%. It boggles my mind that we’re even considering this.
I don’t get this platform. I’m about to just give up on social media altogether.
I just want to know about new games and whatever else that interests me. Why’s that so hard.
You really don’t need to care about whatever’s happening with Threads as a casual user
You do need to care as a casual about data miners that would love to sell your info to health insurance companies and crackhead conspiracy theorists.
5 is an absolutely horrible idea.
1 and 2 are best
