Meta threads will open federation to the fediverse soon, and while this is mainly to mastodon it will still affect lemmy. They are acting like they won’t be evil, but let’s be real this is Facebook when have they ever done that.
This article which has been trending lately explains some of the issues. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This comment here is a simple analogy if you can’t be bothered reading the article. https://lemmy.ca/comment/5702922
Meta is a cancer, there is no benefit to the company being given any access to this instance.
Meta don’t deserve any chances, I’m here to get away from that toxic bull and would much prefer it to be blocked from any instance I interact with.
Here’s my not-at-all-qualified take:
Let the federation ride. If Threads users add meaningful content and activity, then cool.
But the second we see a Meta ad, pull that fucking plug. We should not be distributing their ads for free (or at all).
Yeah but you might have it in reverse. Meta would benefit from lemmy users providing original content. It would basically suck the life out of the smaller instances and people would have no incentive to stick with apps or instances made by the little guys. If Meta started serving ads and we pulled out, it wouldn’t mean much. By then, Meta might have adopted most users - all the while stealing our content.
^ Super hypothetical. I’m not a federation expert. But it sounds like that could happen.
I don’t think lemmy and mastodon are big enough for meta to care about stealing our content.
I think you’d be surprised at how few people make OC for the internet and how those brains operate. I know I’m not porting my content bot over to threads anytime soon. He’s very happy on mastodon and writes frequently.
Let us have all users from Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon and probably Tumblr, and none from Meta. Is it so damaging to exclude them? With them comes the Meta fuckery, them dictating rules. It’s better without them.
Are you planning on signing up for a Meta account? Their rules won’t affect anyone who isn’t using their instance.
It’s not how it works, I believe.
We are as regulated as 4chan.
If they get federated with other big instance, their mil+ audience wouldn’t only bring their own shenanigans, it would bring attention from regulating bodies - for one, and for two - Meta’s want for control over how fediverse is operated.
I would see it as the fediverse being like the UN and Threads being like America. The UN can say whatever they want about their rules and America will and do ignore them due to their size, influence and power.
Once the cats out of the bag, it won’t want to go back in.
When I last looked at the defederations of some Mastodon servers, everyone was already blocking Threads. This was a year ago. Instances running Lemmy and Kbin and like should probably do the same.
Fully agreed, anyone who doesn’t either works for Meta or can’t see the writing on the wall about what this will do to the fediverse.
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I’ll be blocking it the first time it shows up on my feed anyway.
For completeness there was a discussion (outdated) a few months back on this for anyone interested: https://aussie.zone/post/401165
This seems like a very important discussion but let me tell you how I came across it. It’s possible many others on Aussie Zone fall into a similar boat as mine. If not please ignore.
I only use Voyager to interact with Lemmy regularly. Occasionally I check out Aussie Zone via a browser but that’s very rare.
I think the ‘Default feed’ for Voyager is ‘Home’ which are the coms I’ve subbed to. I didn’t even know what ‘Local’ was until I looked it up just now (while trying to find out if Voyager can list all the coms of an instance like the coms page in a desktop browser, which I don’t think it does).
So I was surprised not to see this discussion earlier after seeing it pop up more broadly across the lemmyverse. Turns out that’s because I never selected the Local feed to see what everyone is talking about and because I wasn’t subbed to Meta (as in the Aussie Zone com, not the company) until now.
If my ignorance is unusual for Aussie Zone folk then please ignore this comment. If it’s possible that lots of other active or semi-active local users are not seeing this discussion is there any way to highlight it across the instance?
I’ve cross posted to Australia, locked and pinned which should get some attention from other users in your boat
it can get pinned by an admin, but i dont think thats nessarcery . you should subscribe to [email protected] if you want to see posts about the instance itself.
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Hey that New Comments tip is great. I think I might test out your method of not subbing local coms and using Local to check what’s happening and also subbing to fedded coms so they come up in Home. Cheers.
So this means I’ll be seeing what people post on threads in my lemmy app?
I don’t quite understand, would it be harder to defederate later, once they start becoming evil? Lemmy and Mastodon were founded to actively distance ourselves from the likes of Twitter and Reddit. We’re not here because it’s the only option we have or because we’re creating a whole new system. We’re here because we chose to and decide that we could live without relying on those big corporations. Surely, people here are more willing to give Meta the middle finger and wouldn’t mind blocking Threads if that ever happened right?
Meta is already evil and has been for years. You don’t get back with your abusive ex and say “I’ll leave him if he hits me again”, you get that fucker out of your life. Meta is the internet’s abusive ex
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This is how I think about this.Edit - this is what comes to mind when I think about this
I posted this link in a reply but I’ll put it here just incase. According to this part of the threads TOS by interacting with a threads user they will collect your data and send targeted ads.
https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/111585528118111249
How are they going to send targeted ads when not using their platform?
They could masquerade them as posts or embed them in posts. They would be able to track your IP address through the images they serve - kind of like email
This elitism bandwagoning hurts the goal of providing alternatives to closed source proprietary platforms for social media.
If you want an open and viable alternative to proprietary platforms running social media then you must have a willingness to include those who want to be part of said platforms.
So you want an alternative to closed source platforms, but you want said closed source platforms to be the biggest on the fediverse. Uuhh, yeah…
It’s only the biggest influence on specific instances, if the people in those instances engage with them.
The key difference is if you defederate just because “big is bad” ideology then the whole premise of federated services becomes irrelevant, because as soon as any instance gets too big it will be defederated.
You’re missing the point, people don’t want to defederate from threads just because it would be the biggest, but also because it’s Facebook. How are people giving Facebook of all places the benefit of the doubt? This is insane. If they don’t have an alteriror motive now, they will most definitely later.
It’s pretty unbelievable isnt it? You would think this wouldn’t even be up for debate on a platform like Lemmy but some people seem desperate for growth at any cost.
No you are actually missing the point. If you are on lemmy.your.opinion, then Facebook is not going to be the most prevalent voice unless the rest of the people on your opinion instance support the posts coming from Facebook.
That’s why when you log into your instance, you mainly see feeds from your Instance. You cannot “game” an algorithm you don’t control.
Your fear comes from the influence the mainstream social media platforms weld. And they weld it because of their homogeneous control over their platforms.
The more you try to exclude them the easier it is for them to exclude the smaller players.
You exclude Facebook, then Google, then Microsoft, then Twitter. Then they all band together to push out the rest of us and then you lose another open protocol to absorption or subversion.
I’ll call it now, this is how it will go down. Just like all the other open protocols I’ve seen over the last 25 years… Technically savvy people push back on general adoption because we are generally snobs and elitists.
As far as I recall all these huge companies weren’t excluded from these open protocols and now look at them. For instance - email, try hosting your own email server and see how quickly you will be filtered to spam on most email providers.
A perfect example of something being embraced by huge companies, then extended, and then finally extinguished and no longer viable to do by small parties.
Gmail even marks new Proton mail account emails as possibly “malicious”, yet does not do this for their own service.
I literally host my own email without issue. And this thread is about defederating from a large company.
Literally the sentiment of this thread is about exclusion without reason beyond “big is bad” ideology.
So what the fuck are you talking about?
Well that was uncalled for.
I checked your replies and it’s mainly rage posting and rage baiting.
Enjoy “debating” somebody else.
… you must have a willingness to include those who want to be part of said platforms.
If Marc Zuckerberg wanted to be part of a federated/distributed web, he could have done so with Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp. This is nothing more than ‘Embrace-Extend-Extingiush’ activity.
Couldn’t agree more. I fully understand that people don’t like Meta, but closing people off doesn’t make an open ecosystem, it just makes another closed one that fits a specific viewpoint.
I presume this will be the case, but don’t think there’s been any official announcement yet. The majority of current servers have planned to resist by defederating.
A few points to make on this topic:
- There is presently nobody to defederate from: They aren’t in the fediverse yet, and while we can guess they’ll use threads.net as their domain, that’s all it would be - a guess. There is no point preemptively defederating from that domain when we don’t even know it’s what they’ll use in federation.
- Defederating is trivial from the instance level. Just type their domain to the “blocked instances” setting and it’s done for everyone. This move can be made at any time in under a minute.
- A change to the behaviour of aussie.zone this large will likely be passed by the users in some way. It’s not a thing to undertake lightly.
- The new Lemmy allows users to block instances for them personally. If you don’t want to personally interract with Threads, just add them to your block list and it’s done. You won’t see anything from that instance. It’ll also mean you won’t see replies to their comments made from here. *
* You can’t actually defederate from them yet, as the “block instance” UI searches for federated domains and won’t permit you to add threads.net as that domain is not federated. You’ll need to do this if/when they actually federate with the rest of us.
