Handy site to check your instances thread-blocking status.
What a fucking hateful choice of colours. Green for blocking and red for allowing communication. Really shows what kind of perspective the creator has.
Apparently this is a divisive topic, moreso than expected. Edited for clarity.
Huh? Green means it has been blocked and needs no further action. Red means it needs attention [if you’re on the side of defederating that is].
Everywhere else, red means stop and green means go. Here, the creator has chosen to reverse that to emphasize that they consider blocking to be good and allowing people to connect to be bad.
No attention is needed for the instances that are marked with red. They are federating.
The point is that it’s portraying not blocking as an inherently negative thing, which isn’t universally agreed upon at all. Plenty of people would say that they don’t need any attention at all. It’s not presenting objective in a neutral way, but rather labeling a group as bad.
Of course, it’s probably fair to assume that the author has no intention of being neutral, but it’s still valid grounds to criticize it as a data visualization.
Yay censorship
That is not censorship, my smooth friend. Nobody is censoring anybody in this context.
If you turn your tv off during a newscast are you censoring the broadcaster?
If you’re not going to contribute anything but your rage, you should shut up. This is what the downvote button is for.
No, the downvote is meant to be for things that don’t contribute to the discussion, not for things you disagree with.
If the Threads-blocking instances have this level of maturity, I don’t think we’ll be missing much. Being equally childish as Facebook comments is impressive.
Buh bye! Go to threads then, I seriously dont care.
Facebook has shown time and time again they can not be trusted with anything.
From spreading miss information to starting a coup and every shitty thing between.
Honestly, with the user level blocking feature in personally against instance level blocking as well.
- I strong believe in user choice. It’s clear from this thread that there isn’t an overwhelming majority in favor of instance blocking threads. There does not appear to be one that’s not in favor.
1a) if the instance held a vote on the matter id naturally accept the majority choice.
- if privacy is a concern (which it should be because Facebook), we’re already screwed. Fediverse interactions (comments posts votes) are a matter of public record. So even if we block threads at the instance level, they can still zuck up our data so we’re not really gaining anything there.
Edit: if you’re going to down ote, be better than reddit and expand your thoughts. We’re here to discuss, not act like children redditors
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html
https://time.com/6217730/myanmar-meta-rohingya-facebook/
You’re also forgetting that defederating means that Threads has no interaction with the fediverse meaning they can only do as much damage as a user can to those instances
Your lack of arguments prompts you to post something completely unrelated to the post. I believe you would call this ad hominem or whatever buzzwords you use.
Still too few
When will we defederate from these 58.99% ?
EDIT: And why is lemmy.world federated to threads? I thought we are more strict about this.
Q1: do you want an echo chamber? because that’s how you get an echo chamber
Q2: idk
I’d recommend you create your instance and defederate from the 58.99%. Wouldn’t miss you the slightest!
Yeah, a part of me wouldn’t even hugely mind if these people do wind up leaving, because I’ve been increasingly getting a sense that I wouldn’t hugely miss such great literature as “Suck on my balls Zuckerfuck”
I’m on lemmy.world and am glad it is federated with threads.
Kind of stupid how people like you are trying to push what you want onto literally everyone else.
Yea it’s really stupid that they should have a vote. I think we should attack people for voting their preferences. /s
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.
edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to
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 for each instance 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. I also know that Meta doesn’t need to do anything to take down the fediverse if we do it ourselves.
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 weapons 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.
“The flood of crap” isn’t what people should be worried about. They should be worried about Meta embracing, extending, and extinguishing the Fediverse. There’s a good article about this here. People are worried about the wrong things and don’t realize what’s at stake.
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!
I’m also in favor of remaining defeated, but I certainly understand it’s a big risk. EEE is a real threat. On the other hand, something like Threads is the fast track to mainstreaming the Fediverse and really advancing us away from dependence on big tech
Big risk, big reward. The deciding factor for me is when on the fence I’d rather be inclusive. Creating a big fight against something I’m a bit skeptical of just isn’t worth it.
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.
I’ve done it and it’s not a whole lot harder than that. The additional steps are:
- Install dependencies - exact commands are provided in the instructions for Debian-based systems
- Create a more complex web server configuration file - for which a template is provided
- Set up systemd services to start it at boot - templates are provided
It is harder than managed hosting where you might only need to create a database user in a web control panel and upload files for PHPBB, but there’s managed hosting available for Mastodon.
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.
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.
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.
edit: fyi, i’m discussing lemmy and how defederation here works. not sure how it works on mastodon.
That doesn’t sound correct. If it were, what would be the point of the block instance feature?
If that’s true, that’s definitely something that needs to be addressed. I am all in favor of users having the choice to block instances and their users, and will likely even block Threads myself. This whole shaming campaign against instances though is childish, ineffective, and against the underlying principles of federation. What’s even the point if people are just going to start name and shaming every instance owner making a decision they don’t like?
And for fuck’s sake, I understand the core idea of embrace, extend, extinguish, don’t link me the article (not you, gregorum, just random readers of this comment). I’m just not going to use that as a kneejerk way to shut down any action taken by a company I don’t like.
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
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:
- Federate and use the existing ecosystem to help you grow and to grow mutually (Embrace)
- Add new features that only work locally, drawing users away from other instances to your own (Extend)
- Defederate - the remainder is left with a fraction of the users since many moved away, so the users on the local instance don’t care. (Extinguish)
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.
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.
It is not dumb. Thinking that this time it will be different is dumb:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
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)
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
– George Santayana
It’s not a strawman. It’s an actual man that existed and did the thing. It’s history.
How many users did Jabber/XMPP have in 2004?
recommending everyone I knew to switch to it
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.
GTalk was easy to install, no need to create an account (most already had Gmail), had incompatible features (like making a voice call), later was integrated into the Gmail web interface, so you could use it anywhere. So many Jabber users did switch to it.
Then somehow “broke” in a way that messages from GTalk were coming through, but anything coming from Jabber wasn’t arriving. Since most Jabber users had Gmail account many switches to continue talking to their peers. Stubborn people, like me, were left with rooster full of people online that none responded to you.
At that time Google was seemed like a white knight, fixing things and making them better.
Facebook today is known for being extremely shitty and destroying any competition, and there are still so many naive people.
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
is Metastasis is allowed in the fediverse it will consume the fediverse
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.
Exactly. Any analysis of “embrace extend extinguish” WRT Google/XMPP needs to answer a simple question: how many daily active users did XMPP/Jabber have in 2004?
Basically every single invocation of “embrace, extend and extinguish” is a borderline fallacy that depends on an oversimplified world view.
XMPP/Jabber is even “funnier” because instant messaging as a whole is basically dead in favor of SMS and phone apps. The closest we get on that front is imessage and even that is mostly a US obsession.
Basically every “Oh mah gawdz, EEE is coming for us” article comes from a place of mass ignorance, at best.
As for Threads? I suspect that will eat Mastodon’s lunch. Because it already is. People love giving Facebook even more information and already have their favorite usernames from instagram. Whereas they will never stop bitching about how hard it is to sign up for Mastodon.
And… that is fine. Mastodon is not twitter. It is better. A lot better.
That said? I wouldn’t mind having access to Threads content. And I think there is a lot of room to use Matsodon/federation as a way for advertisers to take their power back, as it were, by controlling their own instances and being able to immediately cut off The Emerald Apartheid when he starts talking about The Jews again. But, if I ever do see a significant benefit to this, I can migrate to an instance that federates or even start my own. Rather than insisting that the ones I have accounts on do what I want.
I think the fear is that this turns into an “embrace, extend, extinguish”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
Edit: I think you can draw a parallel with another scenario: an open and free market requires regulation. There should be rules and boundaries, such that a true free and open market exists. Similarly, there’s an argument to be made than we should restrict the fediverse for it to keep existing in the way we want it to.
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Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
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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”.
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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.
I, for one, support the right of every instance to federate with whoever they choose to federate with.
So do I.
I just think their decisions might be dumb.
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.
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.
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.
Threads wants to join the fediverse to either steal the content and/or kill it, there would be no other reasons.
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 (which I want), contains a hashtag I follow (which I want), or in the federated timeline I already don’t use.
I don’t see the issue.
Feel free to removed when we block Flipboard or Automattic. We’re only blocking Meta, because Meta’s interests are not the Fediverse’s best interest.
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.
Because you know, the entire point is that instance admins are allowed to run their instance how they see fit.
And the users are allowed to have opinions about it.
Correct, but that doesn’t change who has final say over it. You’re more than free to change instances if you no longer agree with how your current instance is being run.
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.
I’m pretty sure this has already happened in the past, I swear there was a “Bad instances” list that someone was passing around, which someone else then disputed that the list was bad due to there not being valid reasons for why an instance was marked “bad” - but people had taken the list as 100% fact and blocked said instances.
That is the double-edged sword of the Fediverse, the freedom to choose who you allow and don’t allow in regards to federation. There’s always going to be the “cliques” so to speak where if you upset (for lack of a better word) the wrong people, the size of that instance can claim that you’re bad, and if other instances take their word at face value without verifying this then all of a sudden you can’t communicate with other instances/people (ie, if you get defederated by lemmy.world or mastodon.social - then good luck). Obviously, the good part about how the Fediverse works is the power for each instance admin to make their own determinations of who they want to federate with, but this is the “bad” side of it which is further amplified by the fact that there are always going to be instances that hold a very larger position of power. In a way, fracturing of the Fediverse is a bit inevitable because of this. I suspect what you say will happen (as I’ve already seen this mentioned).
It is what it is, I’m not saying whether that double-edged nature is good or bad, because at the end of the day that determination comes down to every person who chooses to participate, and is a decision they have to make on their own volition.
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. And they will find a way to do so here because that is their whole existence as a company.
I don’t know why. They “trust me” Dumb fucks.
- Mark Zuckerberg
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No one is crying because people are “being mean” to meta. They’re adults.
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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.
If we let corperate avithilea gain a foothold they’ll EEE us. Learn from history, Meta’s not doing this for our sake
How do we stop EEE or the other option being irrelevant to most of the world? I don’t think defederation does either.
It’s not a choice between those two, and allowing Mark Zuckerberg in the door doesn’t gain us relevance. We’ve already been slowly growing on our own accord and we’ve finally started to cross the threshold to where there’s enough people here posting enough stuff that it’s not a ghost town anymore. Sure I do still run out of content on any given day when I’m looking at my phone on the bus and on my work breaks but it’s usable enough that I don’t need the corporations. The only thing that threads has to offer us is a large pre-existing user base and there’s nothing else. Once we get enough people even that doesn’t matter
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.
In an ideal world people realize they can escape the ads and data collection without losing touch with friends, family and news and Meta goes down in flames but maybe that’s the optimist in me.
Honestly I could see this being a way of trapping people by giving them less incentive to leave. If people like us leave and you have to leave the corporate hellscapes to see our posts that gives people a reason to leave too but if they can enjoy it from the “comfort” of Mark Zuckerberg’s domain they have no reason to leave. That also makes them captive to met us since they can pull the plug in Federation anytime they like or mess with it in a thousand different ways. Convincing people to sign up for another account may be non-trivial but it’s ultimately the best way forward
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.
They don’t need to show you anything in the algorithm.
As for data, that’s complete non-sense. What data do you think they’re getting access to that they can’t already get? If the goal was to trove data they would have done it quietly and not announced it so that everyone could block them before they even had a chance.
They’re federating because of the Digital Markets Act.
In an ideal world people realize they can escape the ads and data collection without losing touch
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.
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.
The only people who disagree with this are those who want to control what other people get to see.
we should have the power to decide for ourselves instead of some biased admins.
So admins shouldn’t defederate from any instances at all? Even right wing Nazi instances with Nazi flags in every profile?
The only people who disagree with this are those who want to control what other people get to see.
Yes, they want to protect their users from harmful instances. This is something the people who join those instances want.
They also want to “deplatform” those types from society as a whole.
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.
but if you don’t like the majority of the fediverse blocking threads then get fucked because this is what the people want.
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.
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.
Say it louder for the children in the back.
This is the solution.
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.
My friend, I’m still getting used to the fediverse as well.
Try not to assume the average user knows their way around this place, lol.
Do I just automatically know which instances block which instances? Lol. Of course not.
Moderators will basically be doing free work for meta. If a Lemmy.ml post blows up on threads then the ml mods will have to deal with the influx from threads users and basically moderate threads for free.
There’s another reason to defederate. Most mods are volunteers. Lemmy currently really doesn’t have the manpower to handle something with a userbase as large as Threads, and Facebook doesn’t have a great track record with moderation, so it’s unlikely they’d do anything about any issues in a timely manner.
Edit: kids -> mods, busy -> really; autocorrect was being stupid again.
