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.
There is nothing to gain from interaction with Meta/Threads
Get over yourself.
There are tons of well-meaning people on threads who’ve never heard of mastodon, lemmy, or the fediverse.
Why would anyone join Lemmy/Mastodon if they could join Threads instead for the same content? Normal people don’t care that your shit is FLOSS or decentralised, they just want convenience.
Why would anyone run their own email server if they could just use Gmail instead for the same content?
Your argument could also be used against the very idea of federation.
Your argument was that people aren’t using servers that run FLOSS federated software is because they’re not aware of them. My argument is that the people who aren’t aware are also people who wouldn’t use those servers even if they knew.
The people who run their own mail servers are massive nerds, the people who are on Mastodon are also massive nerds. This status quo won’t change just because a megacorp adopts ActivityPub (in fact, you eloquently bring to attention how everyone uses Gmail or Hotmail, and basically no individual runs their own mail server*). So if that’s your argument, the original commenter’s point still stands.
*Moreover I’ve heard that because of this monopoly on email, sending email from a mail server you run to the big providers without it immediately getting sent to spam, if delivered at all, is basically impossible.
Only massive nerds are worth interacting with?
Reread my message since my last edit. I’m not arguing that at all; I’m simply saying that if the open source Fediverse wants to appeal to a wider audience, it needs to appeal to the needs and wants of that audience. That’s not the same as merely federating with a closed source instance that already has that appeal.
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lol. Got it. Nerds only via the internet. Great argument.
Gmail killed the popularity of most email services. Don’t let Threads end up like Gmail
And ? Thats still not a reason to federate. I joined the Fediverse years ago to get away from the “well meaning people” dragging us into the pile of shit because they don’t grok that meta/twitter is cancer.
If they’re that disinterested in why Meta/Bluesky is “cancer” then I’m not really interested in what they have to say on most subjects. Its not elitism, its the same reaosn I am not interested in what members of the Liberal Party have to say on a sinject, sure their is some sanity some times but I don’t want to have to wade through waist deep ship to find it.
Being “well meaning” and using “a toxic billionare run platform” are incompatable. You can be one …or the other, you can’t be both.
Ignorance isnt an excuse. Let then stay with their toxicity is all that’s being asked.
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.
For completeness there was a discussion (outdated) a few months back on this for anyone interested: https://aussie.zone/post/401165
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.
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.
Unfortunately, as much as I like Lemmy. It’s kind of stuck in a catch-22 situation.
The bigger it grows the more likely it is to be destroyed by “bad actors”
Imo it depends on how it grows, especially how much decentralization it can preserve.
Instances like Lemmy.world and lemmy.ml are a big threat to decentralisation, however threads would be at a whole new level
Decentralization may be its biggest weakness. It requires too much overhead.
What happens when 100’s of instances are stood up for the purpose of fragmenting or taking over? Or META just starts buying federated instances? The burden will fall on each individual instance owner to try and keep up. Ain’t happening.
Wtf are you talking about? Decentralization is the one thing that separates the fediverse from existing social networks. It’s the entire point of this whole endeavour. It’s even what happens in your failure scenarios, because the problem with someone taking over everything is the centralization it introduces.
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.
I know you’ve worked it out now but here is my own personal take.
I’m not subscribed to any aussie.zone communities. I just use ‘Local’ and ‘New’ (‘New Comments’ also helps) to browse them all in one go after first looking at ‘Home’ in Voyager.
It’s why instance shopping by interest is important for some, using ‘Local’ becomes your community. Mastodon is similar, you join an instance that is related to you and ‘Local’ becomes another browsing tool. I am on aus.social so every now and again I use ‘Local’ to find posts from Aussies that weren’t hashtagged properly (knowing full well there are other australian instances that I’m missing).
If you were on lemmy.world, ‘Local’ would be waste. Too many posts.
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
“I’ll leave him if he facilitates more than 1 genocide”. Shit, too late.
“I’ll leave him if he actively facilitates more than 1.5 genocides (0.5 ethnic killings)”. Damn it.
I’m amazed that people can let a genocide slide like it isn’t the fucking worst thing in the world.
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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.
