It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml admin team took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it’s users will not be allowed to proceed.
We strongly encourage other instance administrators to do the same, given the grave threat they pose to the fediverse.
Gonna go against the grain here a little bit, but why? If they are federated, it will mean that you can move off of threads more easily to other servers and not get locked into a walled garden. Encouraging companies to embrace federation will avoid the shit shows like we’ve seen at twitter and reddit, since users will be easily able to jump ship without much loss. Additionally, apps like threads make federated platforms much more approachable to newcomers and those who do not even know what the fediverse is.
I’d love someone to explain it to me, but this feels like a massive footgun.
I’ll never make a threads account, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to interact with anyone from threads. That’s the beauty of the fediversve: I can still talk to metas users without sacrificing my first born to the zucc.
NO…the beauty of the Fediverse is that corporate interests aren’t welcome here. It’s a new frontier and you’re advocating that we extend an invite to the ones that fucked up the last frontier. Make a threads account if that’s important, you have ZERO argument for the rest of us to need the ability to connect with them from a platform specifically designed for decentralized control.
Some instances will federate with Threads. Those will have much more content because they will be connected to millions of people. Over time, they get bigger than the ones that don’t.
Eventually, all big instances are federated with Threads.
you have zero argument foe the rest of us
And neither do you. It’s the admins of the instances that ultimately have the say. This isn’t any more democratic than reddit. It’s just easier to switch instances if you don’t like something.
There will be plenty of instances for federation with meta and plenty without. No need to get worked up about it. This is what an open standards means. It means people can openly use it.
Your comment has made me realize that I give literally zero fucks anymore about this topic. Have whatever opinions you want - I’m just gonna post memes and enjoy life ✌️ peace.
Exactly what I’m thinking. Also why are server admins choosing what I can do on other instances? Am I missing something here? Why can’t users be in control of who they interact with?
Yeah this is the point that irks me, each individual should get to decide for themselves, I totally get and respect the arguments for not engaging with Threads, but I don’t want that decision made for me. And unfortunately it seems like most fediverse admins feel the same way, so “just switch instances” isn’t necessarily practical
To be fair…you have the ability to fix this yourself by hosting your own instance.
Agreed, I’ve been on lemmy for like a month and already had to make several accounts on different instances because I’m just trying to see everything and instances keep defederating. I understand lemmy is young and growing fast and there will be growing pains, but threads isn’t even on activitypub yet and they’re already being blocked by half the instances.
So far I’ve only got a lot of unsatisfying answers (from a factual perspective). It seems to boil down to how much individuals on the fediverse fear Meta is in their capability of doing a full take-over. Personally, I feel like we’re pretty protected form that. I’ve posted my questions, and still looking for some good answers here:
Damn, i can’t believe how many people immediately jump to the astroturfing accusation instead of discussing the points you raised. I think we can all agree that meta is evil and we shouldn’t trust them. The solution should be to build a network that’s resilient to bad actors rather than thinking we can just block all the bad actors. As long as there are independent fediverse servers supported by their communities, it’s hard to see how meta could totally take over the entire fediverse.
My bigger concern is that meta could gain influence over the activitypub standard, but that’s not a battle we can win by simply blocking meta servers.
As long as there are independent fediverse servers supported by their communities, it’s hard to see how meta could totally take over the entire fediverse.
It’s only hard to imagine for those who haven’t learned the history of facebooks nefarious practices, or don’t know the many successful cases of EEE and sabotage these companies have carried out.
Luckily, many of us do remember, and are not going to let the cancer grow.
It’s pretty damn simple actually. Let’s say we fully federate with Threads, what will happen?
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Threads gets a massive amount of users, they already have 20 million sign-ups on the first day! Their user base will be gigantic
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We’ll get a big influx of content (if Meta does the federation properly), huge communities will pop up on Threads and you’ll join those communities. It’s unlikely that Threads users will join communities hosted on smaller instances, why join a community with 1k users if Meta has one with 200k?
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Now Meta controls 99% of the users AND content. They can switch off federation at any moment. Maybe they cover it with “we have a new cool feature, but it breaks federation, sorry!” in that moment all our Lemmy instances lose most of their users and content. And you lose all your communities you joined
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Lemmy users will migrate to threads, because they want their content back, the fediverse dies (except for a few hundred to thousand hold-over nerds who won’t give up)
Fuck Meta.
This, starting to feel a strong astroturf vibe here because 10 people upvoted the comment above you and yet nobody downvoted yours despite them being made within an hour of each other. It’s like they have bots going and upvoting each other’s pro-Meta posts. FUCK Meta and Reddit, these types of greedy CEO’s who don’t give a rats if they make the world better or worse as long as they make a buck are exactly the reason the people needed their own solution. Meta is literally the antithesis of everything decentralization is about. How the F did these people end up here if corporate control of their communication is just fine with them?
Damn thinking about this, this is exactly what Reddit did with 3rd party apps
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Embrace openness by allowing 3rd party apps on the platform and gain user base in the process
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Once user base is high enough, start introducing features that aren’t available (chat, polls) in the API to entice users to abandon 3rd party apps for new features
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Once the users is high enough, cut 3rd party apps the fuck off and coerce users to use their app with no alternatives. Terminally online users won’t ask questions and will transition without hesitation to the official app to get their subreddit community fix.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Embrace: they embrace the fediverse, bring millions of new users to it and everyone is happy. The fediverse grows and the new meta instance gets a ton of content. Everyone is happy
Extend: meta begins to add features to their instance which clashes with or is unusable with other instances. These begin to pile up and issues develop.
Extinguish: meta unfederates from other instances. People are now forced to stay where they were and lose a majority of their friends and content from metas instance. Or switch over. Mass migration away from original instances. These instances die
How is that different from defederating now?
In the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish scenario, assuming they get to “Extinguish”, the rest of the Fediverse becomes isolated and cannot connect with their friends and content.
If we defederate now, the Fediverse becomes isolated and cannot connect with Threads content, and cannot connect with friends who choose to be on Threads instead of a disconnected alternative.
Sorry to be blunt but nobody here should give a single shit that they “can’t interact with Threads content” from Lemmy. Make an account there if you care that much. Lemmy is exactly the opposite of a corporate-controlled and monetized platform and the Fediverse is flourishing because a need arose to not let corporate fucks ruin everything they touch. If they’re your friends, you can interact with them any number of ways, send them a link however you normally talk, obviously. This is shill talk.
If we defederate now, the Fediverse becomes isolated and cannot connect with Threads content, and cannot connect with friends who choose to be on Threads instead of a disconnected alternative.
And? Fuck 'em, anybody who carries Fuckerberg’s water. Yes, even your dear ol gran if she winds up doing it.
The difference is time. With time a federated Threads will build it’s own massive library of content, suck in it’s own users and then slowly make all of that proprietary and locked down from the rest of the fediverse.
It’s a long con that’s been done several times by big corporations.
De federate now and that content and those users will have to choose now. Meta or fediverse. The scales are still uneven, but less uneven than in that future.
I agree, threads connecting to the fediverse seems like it would be a positive step for everyone. I’m not sure how meta could kill the fediverse as long as independent servers exist. If meta is flooding the fediverse with spam or other influencer bs, then we can all just defederate.
I have an alternate theory that threads is never planning to support the fediverse. They are trying to attract users who are looking for a Twitter alternative, and right now the most compelling option is mastodon. But if threads announces activitypub support, then some would-be mastodon users might join threads instead, thinking it will all be connected. But if threads ends up winning all those users anyways, then they’ll just say fuck it, we don’t need activitypub.
I feel like Threads and Bluesky could lift the entire fediverse ocean, give it content and legitimacy and server capacity. And if the fediverse chooses to Balkanize and fracture in response, before we’ve even seen what effects they have on the community, then yeah we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.
give it content and legitimacy and server capacity
by concentrating said content and legitimacy within their walled garden servers. Then they perform the rug pull and shut the gates closed, they have all the content and we have nothing.
I agree with you. I think this is a way to introduce people who aren’t tech-savvy into Activity Pub and Fediverse, which is ultimately a good thing.
Yes, Meta has a history of being untrustworthy, but I think a place that allows communication between a large population isn’t a bad thing either.
I would rather wait and see when Threads is full federated and what that means. We just don’t have enough information to make a decision.
I would rather 70 million people have joined Mastodon but that’s just not how things work and we need to be realistic.
You realize that accepting meta/threads terms you give them permission to sell your data right? They will sell it to advertisers. They help the fbi and others track your every step. Also on fediverse you info is stored locally if the server goes down you don’t have to worry about your info being accessed remotely. I think I saw something where they said that lemmy and kbin store your data for three days then it gets auto deleted. If I was a large instance I would block meta also. Everything meta touched dies!
I got this step, defederating essentially says to them that I dont consent to them getting my data.
But I’m really missing something here, since any instance that zucc controls that is federated to the large instances just exposes my data to zucc.
Defederating is one step, the instance owners have taken that step now, so far so good, well then zucc will just create a lemmy/kbin instance that they own, they join the fed and not even announce meta’s affiliation with it, my data is still zucc’ed.
one problem it that it has threads has a very large userbase and it will likely flood the fediverse so instances that dont block them may dont really have other content and from what i understand is that the content there is flooded with influencers. At least the type of influencers i think are annoying and too comercialised.
And with the flood of content server admins that only do it for fun will get a problem with moderation.
There was a dude in this comment section that left a link about some type of essay (the link contains something with 15 minutes).
Why can’t people vote for this?
What are the odds meta doesn’t make a ton of accounts to vote their way? Defederating meta/threads is not something that needs to be voted on when we know exactly what they will do to activitypub given the chance
I completely disagree that its not something worth voting, but I already seem to be in a minority ( or less vocal opinion), so…
I don’t understand your position. Why do you want one of the most unethical corporate actors interacting with the fediverse?
AFAIK You’re thinking “worth” as is “should the people’s voices be heard”. The other person is thinking “worth” as in “can we trust that the voices being heard are actually the people’s voices and not a giant bot farm being used by Meta to skew the results in their favor?”
Completely support .ml defederating. But most Twitter/Reddit exiles want/need a bigger network for the breadth and depth of content they got from those sites. Universal defederation does nothing but hand those users (and their data) to Meta.
I want to get Meta’s data without giving them my data. If there are no instances that allow me to do that, I will cry.
Can you change which lemmy server your account is on, or do i just need to make a new account on a server that doesnt ban anything? Does anyone have a recommendation on a server that allows all conversation, uninhibited?
The admins of lemmy.world are generally opposed to defederating and have apparently announced via mastodon (i haven’t seen the official post but several comments have said) that they will wait and see what threads federation looks like before deciding whether or not to defederate.
I don’t understand this logic. Don’t we want Lemmy to be more mainstream and user friendly? Preemptively blocking any mainstream attempt to connect and bring in more users just sounds slightly petulant to me. Like I get meta = shitty company but I don’t get why we shouldn’t encourage more people joining the fediverse. And getting external help in growing it. And threads was the first mainstream olive branch that showed Lemmy, Kbin, and mastodon has legitimacy worth building infrastructure to join.
Idk blocking other people categorically from connecting just seems antithetical to the idea that it should be a decentralized system free to all to join.
But I’m new here, so maybe Im mistaken on the ethos of Lemmy.
Blocking people and ideas that are hurtful to others and greedy is GOOD. Some ideas are bad and should be blocked
I agree. But not everyone on that app are people who share greedy and hurtful ideas. Thats just extreme generalization imho.
This is an excellent read on the idea.
https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376
In a nutshell “Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty.”
Organic growth is good. Growth for the sake of growth makes no sense outside an environment where you need those metrics to convince investors.
