The controversy you are referring to is regarding specifically .world defederating Hexbear “preeemptively” before the latter could federate with anyone, out of fear that the “annoying tankies” may overrun everyone else. Since Hexbear is a relatively small platform run by volunteerss like .world is, and the basis on which the defederation was justified was shaky at best, a lot of users raised an eyebrow. There was a similar move by .world later on where they defederated from Lemmygrad, another “tankie” instance, due to alleged hate speech of which the admins failed to provide a single example, and it was clear as day that .world admins just wanted some excuse to defederate away “the evil communists”.
In this case, the situation is different, because it involves a lot more than just .world. A large, for-profit instance Threads.net, run by Meta, is opening up to ActivityPub, and people are afraid of the reasonable possibility that Meta is attempting to either destroy or absorb the Fediverse as a whole. Besides the shitty corporate attempts in the past, Threads.net is also overrun by a lot of algorithm induced hate speech and far-right extreminsts, and there is a legitimate concern that this will spread to instances that federate with Threads.
Hexbear (and others like Lemmygrad) are different in that they are still part of the Fediverse, they are run by volunteers like most instances, and remain federated with other large instances such as lemm.ee. But the fact that hate speech is rampant in Threads.net yet .world admins want to “wait and see” make the Lemmygrad defederation even clearer and funnier in retrospect, lol. I complained back in the day when Hexbear was defederated that I’d rather let users choose for themselves whether they wanted that or not, and I got told to go to another instance. Now that we are federating with Threads anyway, might as well do that.
Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi 6 months ago
Essentially, Facebook’s Twitter competitor Threads is gearing up to join the fediverse by integrating ActivityPub into their platform. Don’t take my word too much on this but I believe this is due to the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act which requires interoperability (similar to how iOS now requires sideloading in the EU). This is essentially their cheap way of complying.
The fediverse has a strong hatred of Facebook, for various reasons (from petty things like “embrace, extend, extinguish” to much more serious things like Facebook’s compliance in the Myanmar genocide) and a “pact” was enacted of fediverse instances that are simply outright blocking Threads. Part of it is the fear that Facebook will federate its moderation problem and cause a headache (which, in my opinion, would be better dealt with by limiting Threads to followers only - Mastodon and Pleroma allow this).
Opponents of the Fedipact are optimistic this will help a more mainstream audience warm up to the fediverse. The fediverse has a reputation of being unwieldy and complicated to newcomers, and having a major platform like Threads integrating ActivityPub might help bring them in and see what it’s like. Toxicity is cited as a reason for defederating Threads, but IMO I see more toxicity towards newcomers and outsiders coming from the people already on the fediverse, so I’ve been quite apathetic to the Threads thing.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 6 months ago
Yeah I’m in a wait and see with my instance. People act like it’s one and done. When they start they’ll be just another server to me. If they start becoming hostile and everything coming from them it’s terrible then I’ll defederate. Same as any other server.
People are worried about data being misused but, I’m sorry, that’s what happens when we publish to an open protocol. Anyone can use it however they want, and yeah, they’re are scum usage for it
Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi 6 months ago
Agreed. I think Lemmy is more public than Mastodon and co. which do have some privacy settings, but ActivityPub is inherently a public protocol. Appreciate everything you’ve done for Poptalk btw!
Scrollone@feddit.it 6 months ago
In some ways, I trust my data more with a highly scrutinized company such as Meta than a random weirdo spinning up his instance with a home server in his cabinet.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 6 months ago
That’s what I don’t understand about the pushback. Yes we all want privacy, but Lemmy here and the fediverse is not built around the idea of privacy. It’s literally a protocol that shoots out whatever you type to anyone who wants to listen. You can type on any server and it’s going to end up on any other server. Can’t be mad because someone like Meta is seeing that and going “Hm, we have servers, we could listen to that data.”