Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you’re a server admin, please defederate Meta’s domain “threads.net”
If you don’t run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate “threads.net”.
Yeah dude let’s just federate with an instance maintained by a corporation that has undoubtedly caused a genocide in Myanmar by turning a blind eye to a far-right hate speech group that caused an entire fucking minority to flee into another country.
I don’t get why people are supporting and saying “oh it must be up to the user” like bro this is the company we’re dealing with. Fuck that fuck threads fuck zuckerberg i don’t want his shit cancer near something that’s going well so far.
Israel have been successfully pressuring meta to remove and shadow ban accounts sympathetic to Palestinians. The level of censorship is crazy.
OK, I’ll bite. You got something more substantial than “I read it on the internet” to back that up? One reputable source on your accusation? Not sayin’ you’re lying/wrong, just asking for some verifiable proof.
Numerous actual popular accounts and news sources have been suspended. It was major news in the Arabic-speaking world in October. Meta even apologized for auto-translating Palestinian as “terrorist.”
Hate to say it but that’s a fail on producing a reliable source.
Did you want specific accounts?
Palestinian Shebab News Agency has facebook pages shut down
@Eye.on.palestine on IG suspended by Meta, then back up after a backlash.
#IStandWithPalestine and #FreePalestine getting censored by Facebook
Thanks, that’s much better.
You know, you have access to search engines too. You don’t need to be lazy and treat the rest of the Internet as your personal stenographer/research assistant.
Fucking HELL, despite how increasingly easy it is to find information, it cannot keep pace with just how utterly fucking lazy people are getting.
You don’t have to humor the troll. We all have the internet we are all free to independently verify.
At the moment this is coming from secondary sources from within meta so there are no articles about it that I’m aware of. But Palestinians and activists constantly have their content removed, account reach limited, and comments removed (which has happened to me multiple times). People also have their accounts threatened and removed.
These actions are visible constantly, meta have been doing this since the start. For example, when you go to someone’s stories at the top it might show 4 or 5 stories, but when you click through to their profile there’ll be 20+.
Some people I follow don’t even show up at the top anymore and I have to access their stories via their profile page or if I’ve messaged them recently.
After (as of this reply) eight hours, you have produced nothing more than anecdotal evidence if not outright invented. I must assume at this point you are spreading disinformation for whatever your goals may be to that end.
Thank you for wasting everybody’s time.
Go look for yourself instead of being condescending.
Welcome to Lemmy!
It’s like Reddit with the provocative takes and hyperbole, but even more extreme somehow!
This place is hilarious.
Well a good friend of my girlfriend is from Gaza. He has been posting translations from his sister’s account of what it is actually like living there right now. Then some AI artwork behind stories of “this place was bombed, my friends just were killed, etc…” and he got a big notification on Instagram that “his account has been restricted for violent hate speech” even though he didn’t incite violence even one time. He just has posts with 2nd person stories of the situation there.
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If they want to hang out with us, they can make an account somewhere other than thread, bam, done!
If they want to hang out with us, they can make an account somewhere other than thread, bam, done!
“make another account somewhere” isn’t really what federation is about.
Indeed it is, they’re not saying you have to make an account on that person’s server, they’re saying that you can make it on a different server, that’s the point of federation you can join other servers that are connected to them. It’s not to be fully open without any limitations, because if it were then content moderation would be impossible.
Services like Nostr have this problem, they are like the wild West where anything goes and you can’t do anything about it. To some people that seems great but the fact of the matter is those services are filled with right-wing trolls and crypto scammers (likely plenty of other nasty stuff as well) because they cannot be moderated.
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I’m not sure if federating will help meta so much as it will definitely (most probably) hurt the lemmy/mastodon network.
Here’s a similar case that happened before, with the XMPP protocol being coopted by google but eventually killing it in favor of their own proprietary solution:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Big tech isn’t on our side, and we have to handle outside corporate influence with heavy skepticism.
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Excuse me sir, i cant be more agree with you
me too ^_^
lemm.ee already made the decision, based off of the voice of the community yo defederate from Threads
Lemmy.Ca admins blocked Threads about 5 months ago: https://lemmy.ca/comment/901551
You can confirm that Threads dot net is still blocked by Lemmy.Ca by going to https://lemmy.ca/instances and clicking on the “Blocked Instances” tab.
Thanks, I actually forgot that one can check!
lemmy.dbzer0.com also blocked Threads
please take a look at the replies under zuck’s own post in threads.net and determine if that’s the type of content you want.
for those who don’t want to visit, majority of the commentators are bots. some advertising crypto, and others asking for money.
even if you think you can individually block those accounts, keep in mind the size of threads compared to fediverse.
for Lemmy: monthly active users are barely150K40K, while for threads it’s 100 million. there’s no chance you can control that inflow of bots.and if it still doesn’t convince you, you can read threads’ privacy policy, which states that they’ll gather all that pii if you interact with their content.
most of the internet is already bigtech, I don’t want Lemmy to become another arm of it. though I have faith in my instance maintainer and dessalines, the dev.
Let users decide because we’re fucking adults.
Great thing about the fediverse
People get to decide what they want from their platform
Surely you’re aware of the embrace, extend, extinguish corporate strategy.
People only get to decide what they want from their platform until facebook starts extending the spec. Then your client will become incompatible with some posts, and so on and so forth.
In summary, it’s a threat to the platform itself.
Exactly, I hereby decide that I would like to ignore corporate efforts to undermine this burgeoning new platform. I furthermore reserve the right to complain about the loss of said platform in future years by claiming that it’s everyone elses fault for allowing corporate encroachment.
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think jerboa lets you block instances
Yeah dude let’s just federate with an instance maintained by a corporation that has undoubtedly caused a genocide in Myanmar by turning a blind eye to a far-right hate speech group that caused an entire fucking minority to flee into another country.
I don’t get why people are supporting and saying “oh it must be up to the user” like bro this is the company we’re dealing with. Fuck that fuck threads fuck zuckerberg i don’t want his shit cancer near something that’s going well so far.
Imagine thinking Myanmar is facebooks fault. Wow.
Read up rookie
https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in-myanmars-attacks-on-minorities/
I don’t know what version of reality you live in but i hope these articles are illuminating
I can’t imagine why you are getting push back. I can tell you are very passionate in your position and are on the right side of a complicated issue. The only reason I can think of is your idea hasn’t become mainstream yet and people hate it when they don’t know they should be upset.
Either way I have no skin in it and I agree that meta is garbage. Thank you for be passionate about something in this dispassionate world.
:3
I’d imagine is because Myanmars situation is way more complicated than Facebook “undoubtedly caused a genocide”.
Seems like it’s getting trivialized to shit on Facebook
Facebook deserves every ounce of shit it has coming to them.
True.
But do you believe the actual people commiting the genocide and manipulating Facebook shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions?
🙄 I guess the years of violence well before hand we their fault too. Imagine trying to tie years off violence and genocide to Facebook.
It’ll always be Burna to me.
It will always be … a name that doesn’t exist and has never existed?
(Hint: BURMA. It’s hard to sound smart when you can’t even get a single fucking name right! Especially the name that “it will always be” for you. Holy fucking shit!)
You wrote all that over an obvious typo? 🤣🤣🤣🤣
An “obvious” typo you missed when you wrote it. When you read it back after posting. In a post where you were putting on airs of being smarter than everybody.
I fucking love it when that happens and love to rub it in.
That one is actually public record, with
-
Facebook using their influence to set up in the country in a way that made it the dominant form of internet access for the country, enough that a large number of people considered Facebook=internet
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Facebook getting multiple reputable warnings about what was happening on the platform, what their advertising policies and algorithms were encouraging, and they chose to not act on them and instead continued to profit from it
-
They finally did act after a whole lot of harm was done
-
Because it was totally and we have the receipts? Imagine being that ignorant of world events.
Then go join threads.net? Nobody’s stopping you from doing that. That would put you on a server friendly to your beliefs.
Server admins also have opinions, and are not required to take a democratic vote and each individual user’s choice into account. They can decide for themselves, and they will, for good or ill. If you don’t like where it ends up, your user decision should be to fuck off to threads.
I don’t think that’s what they’re saying.
They’re saying that some users and admins might choose to wait and see
“Yes, Jeffrey has, in the past, killed and eaten gay men. But we should wait and see. It’s impolite not to invite him to the party!”
I don’t want to use their platform, but I get why some people might choose to stay federated so that there is incentive to pull people to mastodon and educate people about the issues
There’s enough nuance there that I’m not dead set on either side, and I think we still have the chance to defederate later if there’s an increase in spam and harmful content / disinformation.
“Jeffrey doesn’t always eat people. Just sometimes. We should totally go clubbing with him and spurn him later if he eats one of us.”
I don’t want to join a proprietary service, but I want to be able to communicate with people who chose to join it.
Facebook accounts are free, that’s all ya need man
They are not free because they deprive you of your privacy.
Interesting. Then why would we want lemmy drowning in all that?
Because if the content is federated, then you can access it without sacrificing your privacy.
This is a bigger issue to leave it to users imo. Like lemm.ee admin said a few months ago, threads is too fucking big.
Anything they push on the fediverse will be what users see in All. Plus, popular stuff on threads is determined through Facebook’s algorithm, and it will also determine the fediverse recommendations by consequence.
The above is solvable if you block them I guess, but by default it will completely ruin everything.
However, lemmy 0.19 block feature doesn’t work on users of an instance, only posts hosted in an instance. Add to this that Facebook is a cancerous company making all its money from ads. Expect their bots to comment and make posts pushing ads on all instances.
All of this will also mean high workload on mods to regulate the content. Threads doesn’t bring anything good here, and defederation is probably the only way to protect us.
How about adding a feature to “unlist” an instance, where you could interact with it normally, but its posts wouldn’t show up in All, Popular, etc.?
The above is solvable if you block them I guess, but by default it will completely ruin everything.
Yes. One minute of a user’s time and all that’s gone.
Compare that with having to move instances due to admins blocking at the instance level.
oh no is lose convenience
You have the full right to decide, you can switch servers to one that chooses to, or open multiple accounts. That’s your choice. This isn’t Nostr, in the Fediverse instance blocking is normal and it happens without your input, but you know what does happen with your input? Registering your account on a server that fits your needs best, or as close as possible.
Generally, yes. Perhaps unpopularly, I don’t need to decide about suddenly having meta content in Lemmy. I expect that’s not ever gonna happen.
Having Elongated Musk or Fart Suckerberg in my stream cannot be the default, but at best, opt in.
This is why I don’t understand all the hysteria about this.
If I don’t want to see Threads or I don’t want Threads to see me, I can go to a Threads account and click “block threads.net”.
But obviously that’s too complicated and it’s easier to just whinge to your instance admin about how Threads federation will be the death of us all. 🙄
If there was a bot that just flooded All with far right talking points, do you think admins ought to block that or leave it to the users?
What if it was far right mixed in with cat memes?
What if it started more slowly like a few posts an hour and then ramped up over 6 months to be 1000s of posts per hour?
Well, that’s spam. So obviously it would make sense to block that.
Sure, but where is the line between spam and threads content? If the content a community produces is heavily manipulated, isn’t that undesirable for all the same reasons as spam ?
Leave it to users. Let people decide what they want to see.
Do you think any users would populate a place that’s over-run with trash?
If there are, would they be the type of users who would populate communities you would feel comfortable in?
You will only see the “trash” if you subscribe to users from Threads.
This. Imagine begging daddy admin to protect you from mean Meta.
Imagine zucking on Marks schlong.
You understand that no matter how much you kneel down to service Meta, Zuck the Fuck won’t be trickling anything down on you that isn’t a bodily fluid, right?
And hey, I’m not going to kink-shame. Just pointing out that if that isn’t your specific kink, you might want to wake up to there being zero dollars trickling down to you.
What a meaningless, worthless comment. Letting Threads federate with the rest of the Fediverse doesn’t give Zuckerberg power over us (unless you’d care to explain how it does) - rather, it just gives its users and our users the ability to interacted. Why are you so interested in building walls?
I swear, I’m seeing the western equivalent of wumaos servicing Meta here. Only at least the wumaos got paid; it made sense. These idiots are doing the labour for free!
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I don’t believe the people saying “just wait and see” are genuine users. I have a hard time fathoming that after Meta’s atrocious history, as well as the history of what happens when large corporations get involved – I simply can’t believe these are more than paid shill accounts.
Or maybe I’m the one who’s naive, thinking that people can’t possibly be so foolish…
You’d be a moron to trust them obv, but how would Threads using ActivityPub extingush the Fediverse?
They’re a really good open source contributor with a great track record, I know people don’t like saying good stuff about zuck related things but they’ve helped progress machine learning quite a bit. Pytourch is a great example iirc used in stable diffusion
Comment stolen from user “copygirl” from blahaj.zone:
Looks like they’ll be harvesting your data if you follow anyone from Threads, maybe even injecting ads. Unsure what happens to the data of people that get followed by a Threads user. A large part of the fediverse is here precisely because they want to escape corporate meddling, data-hoarding, advertising and other anti-user malpractices. There’s a number of people talking about this, here’s a recent post that highlights some of the things from their TOS.
It’s not as if something was preventing them from
data-hoarding
and
harvesting your data
here anyway.
So that part about being followed by a Threads user is just a bit stupid.
The danger is in them becoming an integral part of the network where people don’t bother to register at a normal instance, and then Meta pulling out and the network remaining half-dead.
Lemmy and mastodon profiles are public so I don’t know if privacy concerns are a problem unique to federation with meta considering they could just scrape your profile if they wanted the data that bad. I’d be much more concerned about small instance admins losing funding as users migrate to instances that federate with meta until threads and the big instances are the only ones left on the fediverse
How can they possibly steal any data other than what you publicly shared on the internet?
In favor of defederation. If I start seeing garbage from threads in my feed, I’m switching instances. I don’t want Meta pushing their divisive, hateful, misinformation all up in my feeds. Meta will kill fedi. We don’t need them.
Yeah. I’ll switch to an instance that is defederated from Threads, if mine doesn’t.
I left Meta’s other properties to avoid state sponsored hate speech. I won’t use a platform that gives hate speech a platform.
I don’t need to wait to know if Meta will do that. I already know.
I’m onboard with this as well. I can’t imagine this instance would federeate with Threads, and I respect the admins here a lot, but I’d lose that respect and trust immediately if we aren’t smart enough to defederate from Threads. We’ve seen what happens when these tech giants get their claws in anything.
Serious question though - how would you? Meta can’t push content in your feed. The only reason you’re going to see Meta in your feed is if the community here (or people you follow on mastodon) decide they want to show it.
Why not just block the instance?
Currently, I think there are two main branches of ActivityPub implementations: Microblogs(Mastodon and its forks, the microblog portion of kbin), which are user centric, and group based aggregators(Lemmy, Kbin, peertube, future Pixelfed), both of which are valid implementations, however, they don’t really work well with each other.
So, I believe that the threat of Threads to Lemmy instances is really overblown for the simple reason that there is no way for a Lemmy user to browse microblog contents through federation to begin with, whether it be Mastodon or Threads.
Kbin actually does let you look at and browse microblogs as well as threads.
0.19 allows users themselves to block instances…
Meta is a threat to the platform though.
So do preemptively defederate when any corporation makes a new instance?
I’ve seen strong support for Tumblr federation adoption, so no. Context is important.
We should avoid making blanket demands like this to the fediverse as a whole. I happen to support your position, but we should take into account the diverse nature of the social web.
Instead of making demands, explain your reasoning and leave each community to make up their own mind. This is the beautiful nature of the social web; we have broken decision making down into many smaller units instead of one mega instance/corporation.
Find a community that resonates with your own thinking on this issue, and over time a thousand different servers will gather experiences and a picture will start to form; was federation with Meta a good or a bad thing?
How would defederation from meta lead to killin fediverse ?
Basic EEE strategy (embrace, extend, extinguish). For example, take XMPP. It was a wonderful federated chat protocol. Google joined it with its Google Talk application. All was well. Until it wasn’t. You see, Google added some “new features” that could be used only with the Google talk app and account. So people flocked to it. All is still well. But then google decides to close the gates - Google Talk is its own thing now and you can’t talk to people on other servers or with other apps. Take what hapoened wit XMPP. Google embraces XMPP with Giogle Talk. Google add some shiny “new features” that are exclusive to Google Talk (extend). Google cuts off XMPP access to other domains other than the Google Talk domain, thus finishing the extinguish phase.
Just replace Google with Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg, Google Talk with Threads and XMPP with ActivityPub/Mastodon/Lemmy and you can see how it could happen. The XMPP Wikipedia page has it covered very well, and there’s a dedicated Embrace, extend, extinguish page on Wikipedia if you want to read more.
I think we are on same page, I am aginst federating with threads
And what’s the most important - they were a “corporation of good” then. They were doing plenty of such things, which are in fact acts of war, because there’s no other purpose to them, surely not money, - only strangling competition and places where something may emerge.
There’s a list of people that have agreed to block it at https://fedipact.online/
That site is an assault on my eyes.
Graphic design is my passion.
Web 1.0 always was a good lookin kid
The design convinced me to give meta a chance.
Okay. I’ve seen stuff like this on both mastodon, and here, but i haven’t heard about them doing anything that would actually harm the fediverse. I guess i don’t know what the problem is. I know they’ve got a negative reputation, and for good reason, but isn’t that the awesome part of threads being federated? We can follow and connect to people there without being part of their system, and therefor not susceptible to their bs? If I’m missing something please fill me in.
It is inevitable that Meta will try to kill the fediverse while chasing profits, there is no other possibility in their endgame.
If that is pushing ads into other instances or killing those instances entirely we don’t know yet but it will happen.
It has to because the shareholders must always have more.
I just don’t think it’s possible for something to kill the fediverse. And if it is possible, then it is a flaw in the design of the fediverse and needs to be fixed.
Are you planning to pay for the extra bandwith to deal with all the additional traffic?
Meta will.
And then when they own the servers amd all the traffic, lemmy will be quietly murdered.
Quietly, because they’ll control the traffic, and therefore the narrative
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All activity pub needed to do was create a user rights guidelines that prevents profiting off the data. Meta wouldn’t have touched the Fediverse with the 10-foot pole, if that were the case.
Lololol and what legal mechanism are you going to use to enforce that?
People have been writing about this ad nauseum. It’s the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. Join fediverse, extend the spec with so that not all clients are compatible with all features, repeat as necessary until everyone is using your client, finally drop compatibility with other clients.
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Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.
This is an excellent point. Thanks!
in that case considering meta is saying that it would take nearly a year to federate the platform we probably should defederate them.
What point in that linked blog swayed you? The circumstances are quite different. XMPP was dogshit when Google started working with it. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
I really don’t know enough to say one way or the other, but the fact that this is an established Microsoft practice swayed me. I can actually believe google didn’t intend to do what it did to xmpp as a log of google employees from the 2000’s speak highly of the company, but these executives are traded like nfl players, and i know enough about meta’s history to believe they may do this. Besides I’m still new to development, but i don’t see many other reasons why it would take meta nearly a year to fully launch federation.
Actually this just occurred to me, but isn’t it interesting which accounts were linked first?
Just think:
Meta has literal billions of users.
The entire fediverse has about 1.5 million.
Less than a fraction of a percent.
Why in THE FUCK would meta notice, or care, at fucking all? The entire fediverse of traffic ported over to meta wouldn’t budge their advertising bottom line.
But, it’s a comparatively small group of smart people, having conversations, and profiles they don’t have tabs and near total control over.
There’s news about cop city and gaza I have seen here that I’ve seen NOWHERE else.
Don’t let them control the narrative here
Well, then, let’s make our point I’ll just email the holders of the instances I’m on and let them know I support defederating threads
The fediverse is an emerging threat. It’s not ready yet, but it’s on the right trajectory. Every time there’s angst on some other platform, the fediverse get’s a bump. Fediverse is not a real competitor yet, perhaps it never will be, but for meta it’s sensible to establish a presence here in the short term, because it may be much more difficult later.
There is one big reason why they would care - antitrust and EU regulation protection. They have no intention to destroy the platform Rather they want to please the regulators as they are leveraging the open standards. The EEE strategy is a conspiracy theory. Government regulations are the most probable reason for this change.
But that’s good. Meta doesn’t care about Lemmy or Mastodon because they’re tiny. Threads is a threat to Twitter. They want to integrate with Mastodon just because Twitter doesn’t. That’s it.
They’re not going for “total control” of your conversation about Gaza. You are not important to them. You are not the main character in some David and Goliath story. There are only Goliaths.
Do you know why Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram? Instagram wasn’t worth that much. It wasn’t generating a billion dollars in revenue. It probably still doesn’t.
Facebook bought Instagram because Instagram was a growing app that was popular with a demographic Facebook wanted to control. They spent a billion dollars to eliminate a growing threat.
Mastodon and, to a lesser extent, Lemmy, represent a growing threat. Not a very big one right now, but it could become a bigger one. It could become another billion dollar problem for the goliaths on the Internet, in a few years. They need to have total control, if a social media app starts to fragment it just collapses instead as users decide to go wherever the other users are.
Facebook’s 1000:1 user ratio would make Lemmy irrelevant and stave off that billion dollar problem for Facebook down the road. An incredibly cheap way to kill a tiny but growing competitor.
Facebook’s 1000:1 user ratio would make Lemmy irrelevant
That’s the case whether or not you federate with Threads. But if you do, that’s not going to matter because you can freely communicate with people on Threads.
They don’t want to federate because Twitter does not.
But neither to “extinguish” Mastodon or so. They need it as a defense like Google uses Mozilla, showcasing that not only do they enjoy competition, they in fact actively support it, by making their content available over there, too.
Because like you say, the entirely metaverse is so tiny compared to meta, thy could not give a flying fuck whatever the reason if it’s about anything competitive. But they can utilize the tiny underdog as a shield from criticism. And that’s valuable to them.
Meta will be okay making money off lemmy indirectly for a while. Then, if they grow, they’ll want more than a toehold.
When it’s Facebook, trust that greed and power are the goals.
People are concerned because there were examples of such things going horribly wrong, most notably with Google and XMPP.
Way back in the day, Google announced that its Talk messenger will support XMPP, which made decentralization fans very happy - finally, they can communicate with everyone from the comfort of their decentralized instance!..oh.
Google started implementing features in Talk that are incompatible with XMPP, and then dropped XMPP support altogether, ending up deprecating Talk in favor of Google-only Hangouts. This forced many XMPP users to get into Google’s ecosystem, since the people they contacted through XMPP were mostly just using Google Talk, and they couldn’t be contacted through XMPP any more. As a result, XMPP became worse off than it started and got practically forgotten by all but 1,5 nerds who keep it alive.
now most of their contacts were in defederated Google to which they now didn’t have access.
this ☝️. Those of us who remember what happened then, understand the potential dangers of federating with a juggernaut like META.
We should tread lightly!
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This. I don’t care what Google or Meta do, I will never use their services.
It’ll be successful and the current devs will lose the ability to unilaterally control the project.
So competition, that’s what they are afraid of.
If you don’t subscribe to threads you’ll never see it.
will i see (negative) culture change
*everyone doesn’t
How about users make decisions for themselves and block Threads if they want?
