Maybe a hot take, but if you want this big libertarian anarchist federated system you get all the pros and cons along with it. Not having a central authority means you have no real power to stop someone from coming in and taking it. It’s inevitable by design.
41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!!
Submitted 11 months ago by vantablack@lemmy.blahaj.zone to technology@lemmy.world
https://tech.lgbt/@FediPact/111607938980477362
Comments
phillaholic@lemm.ee 11 months ago
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’d say the system is working quite well, ever individual and/or community has the liberty to choose what to do about Meta.
That’s what federation is all about, no central power taking decisions in behalf of everyone else.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
Pxtl@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
I disagree that fediverse is inherently libertarian/anarchist. In fact, a big selling point is that you can find an instance the administration agrees with your politics and will implement moderation policy accordingly.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Sure, to a certain extent. But having an ability to opt out is far healthier than the walled gardens we have now.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
the point of freedom is that authoritarians deserve it too, and when they want to use their freedom to take your freedom away, it’s fair game.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
Things like fedipact are the main way of dealing with such abuse in ancap.
Funny, I’ve never gave a thought to this before, but Fediverse works on ancap principles. Even in pushing out ancaps.
Not even generally libertarian, but specifically ancap.
It’s also funny that the system I’m imagining and would prefer (if it weren’t imaginary) is closer to being generally libertarian and further from ancap.
chitak166@lemmy.world 11 months ago
There already is that someone, it’s the owner of the .world instances.
corbin@infosec.pub 11 months ago
FOSS bros: we’re all about user choice!
also FOSS bros: no not like that
shrugal@lemm.ee 11 months ago
It’s pretty logical actually: The advocates of openness must be closed to one thing, and that is whatever aims to destroy openness itself.
whereisk@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This is like inviting the Catholic church in an institution specifically built to protect former victims of same and similar institutions.
Given that anyone can start an instance and federate with Threads, or join an instance that does, freedom of choice is unaffected.
krimsonbun@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
We just don’t want history repeating itself like what happened with xmpp. Do you really think facebook of all companies is joining the fediverse with good intentions? Do you really think they’re not trying to monopolize this?
halm@leminal.space 11 months ago
You’re downplaying your own part, in between those two statements.
Internet rando: “I choose to enable this corporate, repeat privacy offender in stongarming its way into the open, federated web”
dustyData@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Someone failed ethics class really hard.
rekabis@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
I keep on forgetting that “threads” (in lowercase) is frequently being used to refer to “Threads” the Facebook thing, and not separate sub-communities within the Fediverse.
Was getting all confused as to why the were internally blocking each other.
Y’all all need to learn capitalization, yo. Helps reduce confusion by turning certain things into the proper nouns that they actually are.
Engywuck@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Still too few
Pxtl@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
ITT:
“Nobody understands fedipact, Jabber, activitypub, Ruby, embrace/extend/extinguish, mastodon, lemmy, Java, federation, Kubernetes, XMPP, Docker, architecture, carburetors, Ikebana, midwifery, Filipino stickfighting, Zoroastrianism, hegelian philosophy, or XML but me, and therefore you’re all morons with nothing to contribute to this conversation”.
rainerloeten@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Someone should make a post about why blocking Threads is good and why it’s not to be confused with gate keeping. If not properly communicated, this could look very badly for the uninitiated and they’re not to blame.
Some people of course have an educated opinion against blocking, but many presumably don’t know the reasons behind it.
kokesh@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Ehm… Shouldn’t Fediverse be… Open?
voidMainVoid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Could somebody explain what “fedipact” means?
SeedyOne@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Handy site to check your instances thread-blocking status.
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Weird middle ground here. I kind of wish that 1 communities FROM threads were blocked, and 2 we had an active dev fund for ad blockers. I’m glad to have threads users come here and add to our communities personally.
roofuskit@lemmy.world 11 months ago
What is the share of users that those 41% have?
FlavoredButtHair@lemmy.world 11 months ago
What’s wrong with threads? I’m out of the loop.
ggsu7@futurology.today 11 months ago
Yay censorship
Phegan@lemmy.world 11 months ago
How do I know if my insurance blocked threads
n3cr0@lemmy.world 11 months ago
When will we defederate from these 22.81%
qaz@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This metric seems kind of meaningless if it doesn’t account for the size of the user base
notannpc@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m glad my instance is a sane one.
Interpret that how you will.
JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Been enjoying Lemmy, so I wanted to see how Threads is. “It’s just going to seem like another instance, right?”
It’s Facebook with another skin. The posts are pretty much all the same sort of posts memes take the piss out of. Literally feels just like Facebook… Going to stick to Lemmy, myself.pascal@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Brilliant, all the propaganda about “join us, the fediverse is like email” gone to shit. More like “it’s like email, but if you email ends with @hotmail.com we will block your messages”.
I agree with the sentiment, not with these actions, instead of giving meta users a way to break free, we built a wall between us and them, who have way more content, because we’re afraid of Zuck stealing our data, which is public and he already done.
asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I interpreted this in the context of multi-threaded programs. Very confused.
veeesix@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Percentage of instances is meaningless without knowing their representative size in the overall context of the fediverse.
flango@lemmy.eco.br 11 months ago
Let’s hit 90% 💪!
phoneymouse@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Kinda sucks because now you really have no control over who gets your data. No need to scrape pages or embed trackers when the fediverse just broadcasts your activity to anyone.
Even if your instance defederates from threads, doesn’t mean they defederated from yours, so anything you do is fair game for Meta’s data collection. That’s at least as I understand it.
chitak166@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’d like to join an instance that doesn’t defederate from anything.
Perhaps we can have two separate fediverses going.
pineapplelover@infosec.pub 11 months ago
Honestly, I expected something like 80%. But progress is progress.
arc@lemm.ee 11 months ago
There would be little point being federated if instances couldn’t choose how they set policies or moderate content.
frozencat@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
what does fedipact mean
CowsLookLikeMaps@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
kzhe@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Any instances who’ve promised not to block?
Pxtl@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
otter@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
What I hate to see, even in this thread, is people turning on each other in this “us vs. them”, “you’re either a part of the pact or you’re against us” nonsense
Let’s all remember why WE ALL CHOSE to get on the fediverse and build it. The strength of the fediverse comes from the freedom to choose how to run things. My understanding is that no one in an instance is harmed if some other instance chooses to federate or defederate from Threads.
I hate Meta, and what I know is that Meta doesn’t need to do anything to take down the fediverse if we do it ourselves.
Pxtl@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.
Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only tools that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.
Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.
bilb@lem.monster 11 months ago
I’m not personally in favor of preemptively blocking threads on my instance and I don’t find the EEE argument at all convincing in this case. But other instances doing that is no problem at all, it’s fine!
sour@kbin.social 11 months ago
a house divided…
helenslunch@feddit.nl 11 months ago
It does kinda hurt the Fediverse as a whole when it becomes so segregated.
scarabic@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Embrace, extend, destroy is a thing though.
calvinbacon@r.nf 11 months ago
The fediverse can’t be all star trek memes, maybe go lay on the fainting couch if your blood sugar isn’t high enough
somePotato@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Meta has no interest in being part of the fediverse, it only wants to eliminate any posible competition.
The usual MO of buying the competitors isn’t posible on the fediverse, so the way to do it is embrace, extend and extinguish
Defederating is important because is Metastasis is allowed in the fediverse it will consume the fediverse, and then we’ll be right back at the corporate social media we’re trying to break away from, with the surveillance, ads and nazis being welcome as long as it’s profitable
Zak@lemmy.world 11 months ago
How?
I’ve seen the article about Google and XMPP, but I don’t agree with its analysis. It wasn’t easy to find service providers offering XMPP accounts to the public in 2004. I do not believe that Google embraced, extended, and extinguished a thriving ecosystem; there never was a thriving XMPP ecosystem.
There is a thriving ecosystem for federated microblogging, and federated discussions. While I’m sure Meta would like us to join their service, I’m not sure how allowing their users to interact with us will have that effect, nor how blocking that communication protects against it.
Deceptichum@kbin.social 11 months ago
Utterly idiotic.
Facebook has for 20 years proven time and time again that it cannot be trusted and it is not beneficial for Internet users.
Yet still dumbarse cry over how mean we are to not want them here.
Get this through your fucking head people, Facebook does not have your best intentions at heart. You exist in this space purely for them to exploit.
capital@lemmy.world 11 months ago
No one is crying because people are “being mean” to meta. They’re adults.
What trust is required to federate? If they’re not moderating their own or some other issue crops up, we can block them at that point.
yoz@aussie.zone 11 months ago
Mark Zuck is literally saying that right now to Lemmy.world and other instances admins.
takeda@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It is not dumb. Thinking that this time it will be different is dumb:
ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-ne…
When this was happening I was a huge proponent of Google, and Google Talk, recommending everyone I knew to switch to it, because Jabber with the help of Google will remove monopoly from AIM, MSN, YIM etc.
Google fucking killed the network and I contributed to it (maybe not in a significant way, but I still feel very bitter about it)
Pxtl@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
How many users did Jabber/XMPP have in 2004?
I think we’ve isolated the problem. Everyone is aware of the risk this time. nobody is going to abandon their Fediverse accounts for Threads.
swayevenly@lemm.ee 11 months ago
It’s a straw man argument. Nevermind the dumb comment, the “wait and see” argument is ingenious and insulting.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Forgive me for repeating this, but I think it’s a great analogy and explains all of our thoughts about it:
I’ve used this analogy before, but threads is like a huge, 5k passenger cruise ship docking in a small town in Alaska. You don’t have to know ahead of time that the 2 public bathrooms, one at the general store and the other at McDonalds, aren’t going to be enough. You can also forecast the complaining about how everything isn’t really tourist ready. It will suck for everyone. The small museum will be overrun and damaged, the people will be treated like dirt. It’s an easy forecast.
Here’s the important bit, just because they’ve never been in the cruise line business, doesn’t mean you have to give them a chance to ruin your town.
SeedyOne@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Thank you, someone finally looking big picture. I see a lot of folks talking about things like “it won’t harm Threads” or “the federation is all about inclusiveness and joining together” and those people, while correct on paper, are missing the point.
Put simply, many instances would prefer not to deal with that unnatural influx, and that is their choice. In fact, the best part of the fediverse is not only that they CAN make that choice it’s that they can UNDO it later if need be. I can’t fault some of these smaller instances for being proactive in protecting themselves when few here really know what goes into running and moderating.
Pxtl@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
See, this is the more reasonable concern. Moderating a fediverse instance is hard, and the flood of posts coming from Threads might be a bad problem. That’s a case where I understand the need to defederate. But on the other hand, that doesn’t feel like a solution that needs to be done proactively - defederating from Threads if/when Threads users become a problem seems perfectly reasonable.
capital@lemmy.world 11 months ago
What does that even mean in this context though?
The federated timeline is ready FULL of shit I don’t care about, have no idea what it is, or can’t read it because it’s another language due to people not being able to set their language correctly.
The only time I’m going to see threads content is if it is boosted by someone I follow, contains a hashtag I follow (which I want anyway), or in the federated timeline I already don’t use.
I don’t see the issue.
Isoprenoid@programming.dev 11 months ago
Image
Pxtl@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Have you looked into the process of actually spinning up your own Mastodon instance? It’s not exactly the good old days of throwing together a LAMP box and installing PHPBB on it.
samus12345@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If you just want a hassle-free way to view as much content as possible, there are instances that are federated with pretty much everyone - just have to do a little research. If you want to guarantee keeping post history AND have absolute control over what you can see, you’re gonna have to put in the work to make your own instance.
TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Also - them: it’s ridiculous they aren’t listening to the user the instance: held a vote and the majority voted to defederate
Alto@kbin.social 11 months ago
The super cool thing is that you're more than welcome to start your own instance where they don't block it. Or move to an existing one. Because you know, the entire point is that instance admins are allowed to run their instance how they see fit.
treadful@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
And the users are allowed to have opinions about it.
farcaller@fstab.sh 11 months ago
I can easily imagine the future where “good” instances will then stop federating with the ones that don’t have threads blocked, all thanks to these lists.
TheHobbyist@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
I think the fear is that this turns into an “embrace, extend, extinguish”. …wikipedia.org/…/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I don’t know if the fear is well rooted, but I can definitely understand how Facebook is perceived as not having established a history of trust.
They are a private company, which have placed profits above the best interests of its users.
Pxtl@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
Users are more aware of the risk now. “Oh you should go use Google Talk, it’s an open standard” is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, “you should use Threads, it’s an open standard” would be absurd. The value here is “you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it’s a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users”.
It’s important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft’s tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google’s javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.
FishFace@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If you federate with something too massive though it has undue weight on the entire system. It is likely to be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish again, and it’s reasonable to want to avoid that.
For people who don’t remember, the pattern would be something like:
It depends whether 2 actually succeeds at pulling users in. Arguably most people already on the Fediverse are unlikely to jump ship to Facebook, but you have to consider what happens in a few years if it’s grown, but Facebook is a huge name which makes people less likely to join other instances.
bilb@lem.monster 11 months ago
Personally, it’s the implausibility of 2 that makes all of this seem like no big deal to me. In fact, I think federating openly with Threads might signal to Threads users that they can use alternatives and not lose access to whomever they follow on Threads, thus growing the user-base of other federated instances.
I think people who are going to use Threads for Meta-specific features are likely going to use Threads anyway, and if any of those features are genuinely good (i.e. not simply Instagram and Facebook tie-ins) they will be replicated by the various open Fediverse projects which already differ from one another in terms of features.
The moderation issue is entirely different and there are some instances that have an understanding with their users about protecting them from seeing any objectionable content or behavior as defined by whatever culture they have. Defederating from such a large group of people makes sense, perhaps even preemptively, no different from when they defederate existing large instances now.
Uranium3006@kbin.social 11 months ago
If we let corperate avithilea gain a foothold they'll EEE us. Learn from history, Meta's not doing this for our sake
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
How do we stop EEE or the other option being irrelevant to most of the world? I don’t think defederation does either.
LWD@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Pxtl@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
So do I.
I just think their decisions might be dumb.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 11 months ago
I think the conversation should be about the impact of federating with an “instance” with a long history of poor or apathetic moderation vs. creating an off-boarding system for Meta users to escape the corporatocracy.
Personally I vote for the latter, and I’m glad most of the larger instances are in the same boat.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 11 months ago
If you think Meta will allow the Threads algorithm to show anything from the fediverse you are unbelievably naive. And that’s if content from the fediverse even makes a blip on a platform with 100x the size.
Meta doesn’t federate with the goal of giving Threads users an out. They federate because it’s the most efficient way to scrape fediverse instances and build profiles on fediverse users.
Meta has reached saturation with their existing services so they are now branching into any possible extra source of data they can. They’ll take anything, from fediverse federation to Whatsapp emails. All your data is welcome to them.
prole@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Meta will not allow this to happen, and if/when it does, they will take action. This shit is a zero sum game to these people.
chitak166@lemmy.world 11 months ago
No, I don’t think the conversation should be about the impact of federating with an instance.
If we want to see it, great. If we don’t, also great. But we should have the power to decide for ourselves instead of some biased admins.
BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 11 months ago
Yeah, I wonder how many of those instances are primarily enthusiasts self-hosting.
alilbee@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Especially given that there was just an update allowing for individuals to block instances they don’t like. Forcing this on the instance level is just nonsense, and exactly the sort of behavior most of us wanted to escape from. If I wanted my instance owner to just decide all of this random nonsense for me, I’d just go back to reddit. I’m glad my instance is leaving it up to me.
gregorum@lemm.ee 11 months ago
You can block the instance, but the individual users can still be seen from that instance. You would still have to block each individual user, and that’s ridiculous.
ShittyKopper@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
if you were to focus this on just Lemmy itself as opposed to the wider fedi (“Especially given that there was just an update allowing for individuals to block instances they don’t like” implies that’s the case) you already have nothing to worry about as you encountering a threads user here will be even slimmer than encountering a mastodon user.
threads is primarily targeting the microblog/personal side of fedi. the incentives and privacy expectations are quite different compared to this side of fedi
roofuskit@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Then change instances to one that doesn’t block threads. It’s that easy.
reksas@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
If this wasnt needed we wouldnt even think about doing it.
chitak166@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Say it louder for the children in the back.
This is the solution.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
My friend… your instance has defederated from several other large instances already. If you were on a lemm.ee account then I could take your argument seriously. It’s like the US admonishing Venezuela for going oil hunting, China suggesting religious persecution is unacceptable, or Russia shouting about gay rights.
doctorcrimson@lemmy.today 11 months ago
If you want threads, join threads or a threads friendly instance, but if you don’t like the majority of the fediverse blocking threads then get fucked because this is what the people want.
tal@lemmy.today 11 months ago
That seems like an odd position to take, given the information available. The only number here – the instance count involved – has a majority not blocking Threads.
jcrabapple@infosec.pub 11 months ago
People seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about why Threads is adding ActivityPub support. It’s not to destroy the fediverse. The fediverse is not in competition with Threads.
FlordaMan@lemmy.world 11 months ago
0.19 allows for instance blocking, so the good tools will be available.