https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Many of us do not trust Facebook and anything it is associated with or swallows up.
EDIT:
"Instagram head Adam Mosseri said "
““Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as @[email protected].””
“We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming,” he said.
“If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
To me it’s simple. If Zuck has a part in this, I will find somewhere else to go.
I came here specifically to avoid meta and reddit
Same. If Meta isn’t chased away, I’m leaving the Fediverse. Once I ripped the reddit bandaid off, my loyalty to any one site evaporated. I won’t feel a thing if I need to find somewhere else to go.
Yup, all that matters is doomscrolling and shitposts, and we can all get our fill of content without any corporate fuckers fucking this shit the fuck up.
Also, Fuck spez and fuck Reddit.
Save some fucking for Ajit Pai while we’re at it.
Gladly, thanks for the reminder.
If this instance doesn’t defederate from Threads, I’m sure plenty of others will. And you can always host your own and lose very little functionality. That’s the entire point of the fediverse. Tying your view of the fediverse to one single instance is kind of missing the point.
My concern is the embrace, extend, extinguish method that will ruin the Fediverse regardless of the number of instances, as big tech giants are so adept at doing. I don’t have an optimistic outlook here. Meta is here for a reason, and they aren’t going to just go away now that their foot is in the door.
deleted by creator
I don’t see how they can accomplish that though. They can’t really bring any value other than lower barrier of entry to users. They’re exposed to other instances and everyone can point out what they’re giving up when they can literally lose nothing by switching to a different instance.
Everyone read one article on ebrace, extend and extinguish and now they’re experts on the subject matter
For all I see is that the biggest threat Threads brings to us is that by federating with them you’re going to receive a shit ton of facebook quality content
Yes. They have destroyed enough internet they shouldn’t allowed to touch this.
deleted by creator
hold your horses guys. But seriously, lets not put too much pressure on the Admins, they’re doing a fine job maintaining the servers. I guess we wait how Meta will federate and let the admins take time to decide.
Yes please block them, I don’t want Meta poisoning Lemmy. If I wanted to see facebook content I would have a facebook account, I don’t.
federation with meta will bring nothing but evil into our niche little corner of the net and i am not for it.
Don’t federate with Meta, please
If I wanted to be on meta I’d make a meta account
Please defederate from Meta while it is to our advantage.
In case Lemmy.world doesn’t defederate, I need an instance recommendation. Preferably something active. Not lemmy.ml and beehaw.org, I’m not going back to those. Anyone got any ideas?
I’m aware of the beehaw drama… But what’s the issue with lemmy.ml?
Please don’t federate with Meta. You can guarantee they’ll ruin all that is good about the fediverse.
Honestly, I feel like u/ruud is gonna see these comments and keep Zuck out of things. He seems like he cares about what’s going on up in here.
If they are going to block it, I would have thought they have decided that already, though seems like mastodon’s head agreed - how much was he paid, I wonder.
Mastodon’s head can’t choose who individual instances federate with. I think he’s in charge of like, one? How many people in this thread have already shown they have no clue how federation works?
Yes, that is why I’m asking the admins of lemmy.world if they are going to block it.
Also, this is the largest mastrodon server that is likely federating with threads, so not a small deal.
I don’t see what people are afraid of. Lemmy.world can do what it wishes, but I honestly don’t see where the fear comes in. At the very least just mark it invisible. Let those other users see what other alternatives are out there.
What problem are you trying to fix by blocking them before even seeing what it’s like (without using some vague notions)?
Will it even natively federate with this format? Just as Mastodon doesn’t default to trying to display posts in its feed and Kbin doesn’t by default show Mastodon or PixelFed, etc. You might be worrying over nothing.
Your server federated with Mastodon instances. I’m assuming you aren’t inundated with Mastodon posts.
Have you watched how growth-at-all-costs tech companies behave? They are ruthless. Nothing good can come from them joining.
Their joining inti the fediverse is not influenced by a server preemptively defederating a source that isn’t even live yet. I don’t truly care who defederates who, but forcing them to do so early doesn’t make sense. If it’s truly as bad as you say, they’ll be defederated fairly quickly. I just don’t like folks literally causing infighting simply because some admins are fairly level headed.
I haven’t seen infighting so much as just active discussions on the merit or lack thereof of joining hands with a known bad actor like Meta.
As long as lemmy.world blocks it, it’s not an issue - for us anyway, I hope. Though meta are devious - you need to be watchful.
“Anyone who disagrees with me has clearly been bribed”.
I think it is not-naive to assume that the ridiculously wealthy Meta, which is known to purchase smaller companies, has met with the much smaller mastodon and offered them money. It may be cynical, however it is not-naive.
It’s naive to think they’d actually care that much especially since it would hurt them a whole lot more of that info got out. They gain nothing. With the number of level headed people just claiming wait and see is clear that it’s a very widespread concept. There’s no need to pay anyone. It’s simply the principle concept behind the fediverse. It’s admins following the actual principle of the fediverse. They’ll defederate once there’s an actual concrete reason and not a bunch of FUD instead.
I have done a little bit of reading but I’m still not sure what the issue is. Is it that Threads will take over and defacto become the entire Fediverse? Because I think that would happen whether or not Mastoson/Lemmy instances choose to defederate. Is privacy the concern, and if so, wouldn’t it only affect people using Threads?
Because this is reminiscent of what happened with XMPP. In the old days you had many closed source protocols for instant messaging. Then XMPP came along and started gaining steam. At that point, major platforms started using it, with everything federated. Someone with Google could talk to someone on Facebook and with someone on myown.sillyserver.net. Everything was going great. But obviously the majority of people went with the easy option to go with Facebook or Google, meaning you still had a federated network on the paper, but with a few actors weighing way more than most.
Obviously at that point, they slowly defederated, preventing their customers from talking to their contacts on other platforms. But most of their contacts where on the same platform, so the cost of migrating was higher. That’s how the federation ended. XMPP still exists, and was actually used by WhatsApp in a non federated way, but it is the shell of itself with not a lot of people using it.
A social network strength is in its number. Accepting Meta into Fediverse creates a very real risk that they will try an embrace and extinguish strategy and in the end you will have most people on Meta and just a niche of people on Lemmy/Mastodon, similar to how it was a few months ago.
The goal of the fediverse is to find the proper balance between having multiple platforms big enough so that moderation and technical management can be done by knowledgeable people, but small enough that they cannot decide willy nilly to defederated. Having Meta in the fediverse would very probably break that balance.
XMPP died because of competition. Everyone is forgetting everyone said Google was losing the chat wars with Apple and that’s why Google repeatedly released new systems. Google left XMPP and that isn’t why XMPP failed. It failed because virtually everyone had either an Apple account or Android account. So they all had a chat account already. They “destroyed” XMPP the same way Blackberry hurt XMPP at the time as well. XMPP would be just as relevant if Google never federated with it.
It’s a combination of EEE (Engage, Enhance, Extinguish) tactics, as well as toxicity overload. Meta are notorious for manipulating their viewers. Threads will rapidly devolve into rage bait, since this gives maximum engagement. They will use us to dilute the resultant toxicity. Once it’s established, even de-federating might not be enough. It could generate a locust like influx of toxic new members. The federation doesn’t have the community robustness to absorb that sort of hit right now.
FB has proven time and again that they don’t care to moderate their spaces, and they increase engagement by presenting the most toxic and angering things to you. Community groups in particular are absolutely hideous on there, full of people angry at the (insert minority group) walking down the street. I don’t want that in my life again, and I don’t want it infecting lemmy. If I did want to engage with that type of content, I’d make an account on Threads.
That said, I’m not out here making demands of our admin and moderators right now. They’re busy just keeping this place running. The threads situation won’t be going away tomorrow, so it can wait a hot minute.
Read up on EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish).
For me it’s mostly because massive corporations love to destroy any possible competition. It has happened repeatedly in history. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I came to lemmy because I hate all those guys and I don’t want one coming in and destroying it. Meta has absolutely no incentive to help the fediverse. He is here for the free code, to fuck with Elon, and destroy some competition. That’s it. Don’t let him.
I also don’t understand the issue. I’m against meta / twitter / reddit (hence my account here), but how does Threads bring about a degraded experience in any way for lemmy.world users? I feel like if anything this is a great way to get more people comfortable with the concept of the fediverse and push them one step closer to breaking away from the traditional social media companies. So far all I’ve been able to see is “Meta bad, defederate”.
I like your optimism, but Meta is a relentless cancer and FOSS is its enemy. It won’t sit idly by while ideas of ad-free alternatives grow in its users minds. Nothing good can come from Meta’s mingling with non-profit competition.
The only silver lining is how incompetent these corporations have been lately. Fingers crossed, they’ll fuck up whatever nefarious shit they have planned, and the fediverse can carry on in some state when they try to pull the rug - at the very least for those who value its ideals over user count, but hopefully also still as a viable and active alternative.
Here’s an accessible summary of a few historical examples of why people don’t want corporations adopting their open source platforms: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
“…but how does Threads bring about a degraded experience in any way for lemmy.world users?”
Because our feed will be full of the kind of stuff that people will be posting on Threads, complete with whatever boosting algorithm Meta chooses to use on there. That’s not why I’m here. If I wanted a heavily tilted feed of whatever Meta thinks I should see, I’d be there.
Algorithm wouldn’t work well because the whole value to Meta is that it’s curated per user. You can’t do that here. It’d need to be one algorithm for the entire world. So it’ll be very limited at most. Plus they’d have to break the spec to even cause it to happen. At most it’ll be secondary affect in that Thread users upvote it. But even then, if it’s a poor experience, then defederation would be imminent. I’m just against the whole idea of being upset it isn’t happening before we have any remote idea of how it works out.
They will be hovering up your data and in a while they’ll EEE this place to corporate death.
EEE isn’t a verb. It’s a type of attack. Without defining how they possibly could, it’s mostly FUD. And they already can access your data regardless whether they are defederated from your instance or not. Defederation means you don’t see them, not that they don’t see you.
They can already hoover up all your data. Fediverse data is by design very public.
One concern would be:
- Say Lemmy/kbin grows organically to 1 million users.
- Threads federates, with 100 million users
Do you want these users flooding Lemmy? I don’t want to be biased at the theoretical type of user on Threads, though if the right wingers/trolls/extremists migrate to Threads because they think it’s “more open” then that may be an issue. If it’s full of soccer moms posting pictures of their kids, or karens complaining about everything, that may be an issue.
Multiculturalism is great, I want to hear new ideas, though some areas are breeding grounds for lower-think, it seems. This probably sounds prejudiced or elitist.
I want to talk to the vanguard people who take the risk and are openminded and come to lemmy, not necessarily the “lemmings” who join facebook because they love facebook and don’t want to, or can’t, delve deeper into why facebook is one of the worst forces in media at the moment.
I am not prejudiced (I hope) against “regular people” and “soccer moms”, though think that if 10 million soccer moms came here, the discussions may not be as… interesting, as they are.
Also, I don’t know what lemmy instances will think about downloading masses of data from threads.
I think this will be pretty manageable by finding and using communities that are well-run and have explicit rules and standards of behavior that are enforced. If a community is explicitly meant for serious conversations about, I dunno, music theory, that is enforceable, and if Suburban Subaru Sarah actually wants to join in on that, all the better, but pics of her kid’s soccer game will belong in a different space, just as much as pics of some nerd’s Warcraft raid do too.
Sure. However, you can’t trust meta, so anything that is done I hope has several failbacks and get-out clauses.
Ultimately, there is simply no mechanism for Meta to interfere with a community that it doesn’t federate with. I can definitely see a bit of a split developing between Meta and non-Meta instances, but beyond that, there’s really not much to worry about
This is such a bad analysis of that situation. You are relying on it too much. I’ve pointed it out in other replies to your countless posting of this link with no context.
I donate money to this platform because I want an open and free internet. I want that for anyone who wants to partake. I don’t want extremists, sure - but I think the “soccer moms” you are referring to are really just your average internet consumer. If we don’t agree on that, that’s fine - I’m happy to move to an instance that’s not as restrictive. I think that’s the beauty of the fediverse. I think it’s ironic when you talk about wanting open minded people to join the instance though lol.
I have nothing against “soccer moms”, I just don’t want to see endless photos of their kids, which may be ironic since there’s shitposting on all social networks. Perhaps we’d be able to ignore those communities, however it’ll leak over to other communities.
It seemed to be “fine” when “those” sorts of “regular folk” stuck to facebook for their fix of sharing their lives.
Anyway, this aspect isn’t the main point, I’d say - it’s that one cannot trust facebook, and if they want to federate, it cannot be good for us.
Personally I don’t care about the soccer moms, my main concern is all the problems that come with being a mainstream social media platform. Threads threatens to overwhelm the content being generated with all those problems where your Lemmy feed is just going to represent Instagram etc again. Screw that.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about when using the generic “soccer moms” - mainstream twitter/facebook posts.
I’m probably confusing myself as I have nothing against “normal people”, and want them to discus sthings, and I’m sure there could be a lot of good discussions that could be had with “normal people”, though being drowned by mainstream media posts is the main issue, as you say.
And if that experience ends up being negative, instances can choose to defederate. Many admins just want to see if it will actually be a problem. If admins choose to solve a problem that doesn’t exist yet, let them. But let’s not protest instances and destroy communities over possibly nothing just because the admin is curious to see what happens.
I think it would be easy enough to unsubscribe to the EndlessMoppets community and only subscribe to communities that curate Moppetless posts.
As far as leaking over goes, I never had a problem with EndlessMoppets leaking into any of the subs I did subscribe to over on Reddit.
And for what it’s worth Lemmy is not encrypted so it would be silly to think Meta isn’t already vacuuming up all this content already.
I don’t want them commercializing the space. I feel as though we came here to get away from that. I fear an EEE tactic at worst, ads possibly showing in my feed at the least. But its not like we can’t defederate after launch if it is terrible.
It’s starting to look like the capacity for a user to independently defederate their content from specific platforms is in order. Even better would be the capacity to select what specific content is federated where when publishing.
I personally want nothing to do with Meta, but I’d prefer to have the choice rather than having it made for me by the admins.
Agreed. I am already blocking communities I don’t care for all the time but sometimes it would be much easier to be able to just block their entire instance (because the whole instance circles around the same type of content). I won’t be able to find one single instance the federated with just the right others for my taste so let me just filter myself.
Blocking and defederation are not the same, just to note. If you block someone, I’m pretty sure they can still see your stuff. You just can’t see them. Defederation would actually stop them from seeing your stuff.
You can’t have an instance that runs on your personal set of preference unless you run your own. Somebody else went to the effort of buying a domain, hosting, handling moderation on their own time, and everything else that comes with running a fediverse instance, so if you sign up to that instance, you get to deal with their rules.
Even if you found an instance which suits your desires–which ultimately amounts to being essentially unmoderated, since you don’t trust an admin to be in charge of moderation–you’d find it getting defederated by other instances because bad stuff happens in unmoderated spaces. What you’re asking for, an instance which can access everything at all times, is fundamentally incompatible with the nature of the fediverse. I’m not being glib, but if that’s what you’re here for, you’re in the wrong place.
That’s not at all what I’m here for but okay.
It sounds like you are, because if you want a place where you alone are in charge of what content gets blocked, what you really mean is a place where nothing gets blocked by the admins, so that it’s all up to you. If you want to be in charge of everything you see, all of that content must be allowed to reach the instance, i.e. it must be unmoderated and federated with everything.
I can’t even interact on lemmy.world with my mastodon.world account. Is it really worth worrying about Thread accounts being able to interact here?
I have a feeling Thread is never going to bother with ActivityPub anyway. I suspect the threat was only ever a hedge in case Thread wasn’t as wildly successful on launch as it turned out to be.
"Instagram head Adam Mosseri said "
““Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as @[email protected].””
“We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming,” he said.
“If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
I’ve seen the quote but not sure how it applies to what I said.
Just because they add ActivityPub support doesn’t mean it will work with Lemmy. That was why I gave the example of Mastodon.world not working with Lemmy.world.
And that quote was from before the launch which is what spurred the second part of my comment.
Again. You’re replying with a comment/link that does not address any of the points I made.
They provided little in the way of extra elaboration but that link explains a very good reason to be suspicious of corporations and hesitant to add them to any open platform. That directly speaks to your original question of why should you be concerned. I understand that the format of lemmy and threads aren’t entirely compatible and if that’s the case, then there is no need to federate with them as federation can only cause issues and provide no benefit.
That article is FUD. Apple hurt XMPP just as much by never joining it and offering a messaging system within their own ecosystem so folks had no reason to create a second account. XMPP would have been harmed by competition just as much if Google didn’t join it. It was competition that killed it. Not that they had joined.
The article isn’t FUD. FUD is a propaganda tactic. This is a recounting of events from the perspective of an insider. Just because it may give cause to have uncertainty or doubt or hell, even fear, doesn’t mean it is a propaganda piece. And especially knowing how tech giants behave towards any and all competition this is really just a textbook retelling of one of the many events that fall into this same pattern.
Isn’t Threads federating with Mastodon, not Lemmy?
There is “one” fediverse. Any instance using ActivityPub can talk to any other instance using ActivityPub for the most part. Depending on details, you may get a degraded experience (like mastodon trying to view Kbin wouldn’t work super well). Honestly, there probably won’t be too much federation between Lemmy/Kbin instances and Threads. They’re not very similar in use.
Mastodon and Lemmy are linked (you can see replies form mastodon users and posts), and if threads joins then we are all linked.
i really hope we keep conglomerate out of the fediverse… they will commercialize it.
Threads has 60 million users in 1 day, the fediverse has 12 million over years of growth.
We’d be keeping ourselves out of Threads, not the other way around.
They can keep their 60 million threads, most of that is complete trash anyway.
That 60 million includes the vast majority of people’s actual real-life friends and family.
I know “les normies suck lulz” is a popular sentiment here, but I don’t think constantly harping on how much we hate the average person and find them to be trash is a particularly good way to create a positive and welcoming community.
This issue is less about accepting them, and more about preventing Meta and their scummy practices. I don’t want their hateful algorithms involved here. I don’t want their growth-at-all-costs mindset that will damage things more than any of their content will help. Whether the content has any value is a matter of opinion but my issue with this is that there are platforms for that kind of content already. If you want and enjoy it, go there. The fediverse so far doesn’t have the corporate evils permeating it, and very few communities online get to say that. No good can come from allowing meta in the door, and inevitably it will kill the fediverse in some form or fashion. People like to say “oh we can defederate later”. Later? When it is harder because now you have people hooked to the “content” coming from there? No, it’s best to never open the door in the first place.
Their algorithm can’t apply here. It isn’t how ActivityPub or algorithms work. Their algorithm is per user. So that right there can’t migrate over. So a global algorithm which is way less useful is the only way. The only way to do that and have other instances ‘see’ it is to mess with the statistics. So they’d need to break spec. So if they do that (and destroy the ability to get user responses like upvotes and boosts for their native algorithm, ie make it less valuable to them) they’ll get defederated anyway. The argument here is just let’s see how it plays out. Literally nothing is lost by seeing what happens. If it’s a bunch of garbage, most instances will defederate anyway and no problem. There is no downside to wait and see.
I appreciate the perspective, but I still disagree on whether there is a downside. Waiting and seeing what happens with a group that is known to have malicious intent isn’t going to ever be a true net gain. So why wait and see? We all see enough from their platforms. Why invite that here at all? And once they are in the door I argue it’s harder to expunge them because now you have their end users in the mix crying out that they don’t want Threads defederated.
Threads does have the chance to bring the fediverse into more mainstream acceptance. It may introduce users who wouldn’t otherwise know there are alternatives. The net gain may not be one for you specifically, but the concept as a whole. It may not do that, but it can. And the argument against waiting and seeing being Thread users making noise? That seems farfetched. They don’t hold leverage at all.
