- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@kbin.social
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@kbin.social
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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.
Yes, yes and yes (I contribute money).
Ditto. I also try to file good, clean bug reports with detailed repro steps where I hit them. Not just “it’s busted, fix it”. I’d love to contribute actual code, because I’d like to think I’m a really good programmer (been coding professionally for decades), but actually fully getting a hosted Masto instance up to the point where you can edit the code and see it live is a freaking nightmare.
“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.
The Ploum article again. Please explain how the circumstances with XMPP and ActivityPub are remotely similar.
Both are open protocols for communication over the Internet. Both have been adopted by a large corporate interest.
Now, how are they different?
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here.
It’s not about pulling the plug. It’s about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it’s going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they’ve never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
They are different because most users weren’t aware of XMPP. They weren’t making a conscious choice to use an open standard. The fediverse, on the other hand, has grown specifically because people are seeing the value of an open ecosystem.
When google started removing XMPP support, users weren’t aware and didn’t care (other than losing contact with a few holdouts). If Meta implements AP support and then removes that support or modifies it so that it breaks some of expectations of the fediverse, most users will move to instances that don’t use Meta extensions. Meta can not take your instance or make it use their extensions, so an open fediverse will always exist.
Well that and the story while not “wrong”, is definitely hyperbolic. The author even stated after stating that Google killed XMPP that they didn’t. So which is it? I’m not a dev, but an avid open source fan. i first tried Linux in 1995. Started using jabber itself in 1999 through Gaim. Later pidgin and psi clients in 2001-2. There were a ton of problems beyond Google. As far as clients were concerned there was no reference version. And there really were no large professionally run servers like mastodon.social or lemmy.world. People, myself included put too much hope in the Google basket. It was a massive unearned win in user count. That was just as easily lost. And kept people from focusing on the core service. Yes Google was never a good steward. Corporations never are. But the lack of official clients and servers, plus their decision to persue IETF standardization had as big or bigger impact on the services development and adoption.
The moral of the story isn’t that Google or anyone else can kill an open source project. Microsoft Google and many more have tried and failed. The moral is that we shouldn’t cater to them or give them special treatment. They aren’t the key to success.
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.
If it was literally any other company I’d be much more willing to embrace it.
But Meta? Nah, they’re too hellbent on a social media monopoly to consider a good thing.
You’re only a bit skeptical of Meta?
After all the dodgy shit they’ve done for 20 years and you’re only a bit skeptical?
a house divided…
Embrace, extend, destroy is a thing though.
It is
I’m not sure if defederating is the correct counter to it
Defederating from known-bad-actor corporations during the “embrace” phase seems like a perfectly wise choice to me. Keeps them from getting to stage 2.
It’s not about us embracing them, it’s about them embracing the protocol, which they can do whether we stay federated or not.
The argument against defederation is that it tells newcomers that the defederated instance is an island and they’re better off joining the place where they can talk to their friends. Meta can more easily extend if we’re not around to explain why extending is a bad thing, and if we’re not around to advocate for people to ditch Meta’s platform and join an open one
Here is what it actually means
Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard. Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the "simple" standard. Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.I think it’s naive to imagine that anything we say or do will influence Meta’s behavior or strategy in any way. But I do see your point that when an instance defederates from Threads, it makes an island of itself, not of Threads.
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What?
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.
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Mark Zuck is literally saying that right now to Lemmy.world and other instances admins.
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)
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.
Then somehow “broke” in a way that messages from GTalk were coming through, but anything coming from Jabber wasn’t arriving.
Google intentionally turned off XMPP federation in its chat product.
I’d attribute it to malice, but looking at how badly Google has repeatedly mismanaged its chat offerings I’m going with Hanlon’s razor here. They did claim spam was an issue as well.
I guess I was lucky enough to avoid spam, but I believe you.
As for them doing it unintentionally, I dunno… They did very similar thing to Usenet as well (although in that case spam had a major part.
I think Google’s way of operating is to try new things and see what sticks. Once it gets popular figure out if it can generate revenue and if it doesn’t, quickly shut it down.
False. Google mail was invite only at this time.
I said it was added to Gmail later.
Gmail went public on February 7, 2007, the last release of GTalk was May 14, 2013. Anyway by the time GMail went public, everyone and their dog had a Gmail invite.
Can you share the secrets to somehow even being a 1/4 as optimistic as you are?
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Pxtl’s response is a straw man argument. Nevermind the dumb comment, the “wait and see” argument is disingenuous and insulting.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
– George Santayana
A pithy quote proves nothing. You can come up with duelling aphorisms for almost any issue. For example:
Remembering everything is not the only solution. Perhaps, forgetfulness can make us live in peace too.
– Mwanandeke Kindembo
It’s not a strawman. It’s an actual man that existed and did the thing. It’s history.
What?
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.
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.
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.
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This implies Google is organized-enough to have any coherent concept of strategy. They made a browser because everything they make is web-based and wanted to control that. They add non-standard features to the browser because they want to do stuff that isn’t doable as part of the standard, because the web is a document engine that has been perverted into a general-purpose application platform.
This implies Google is organized-enough to have any coherent concept of strategy.
I am confident that Google does have a high-level strategy regarding areas that they move into. That doesn’t mean that everything that they do that creates compatibility issues is an embrace, extend, and extinguish attempt, though.
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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.
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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.
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 appreciate your commitment to this meme. I don’t exactly agree with you, but hilarious nonetheless.
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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.
but there’s managed hosting available for Mastodon.
FWIW, I recall when elestio announced that they were offering managed hosting for kbin, and that they already did managed hosting of lemmy instances, and and I’m sure that there is managed hosting for at least lemmy available elsewhere.
Doesn’t it require a whole mess of Docker instances and some kind of orchestrator to host? Or is it easier to stand up on a single server now? I haven’t looked into it in a year or so.
It does not. I set mine up more than a year ago and followed these instructions.
People already familiar with Ruby on Rails will not find any surprises there; Mastodon’s hosting requirements are typical of a Rails app.
If we let corperate avithilea gain a foothold they’ll EEE us. Learn from history, Meta’s not doing this for our sake
Yeah, I wonder how many of those instances are primarily enthusiasts self-hosting.
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.
Feel free to removed? Is that client side or server side?
Good question
Server side. Lemmy.ml has a slur filter.
Then change instances to one that doesn’t block threads. It’s that easy.
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.
0.19 allows for instance blocking, so the good tools will be available.
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.
I experience this a lot on Reddit where /r/Infiniti gets cross posted to a massive sub and now two mods are dealing with 500,000+ users. I can’t imagine how much more annoying it would be if I was also paying to host the community.
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.
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.
Yes. My personal guess is that they want to start Threads as just another Federation instance where people build communities and relationships across instances as they do already, and act like a good Fediverse instance, all friendly and open and free . . . and then once there’s enough popularity and/or cross-traffic they will wall off the Threads portion and monetize access, so you’re forced to either pay up to continue in the parts you like and are invested in, or walk away leaving everything you put into it to Meta and paying users.
Oh, and they’ll suck up as much Fediverse data as they can too, while they’re at it: anything they have access to will be hoovered up for their commercial use, just as it is now. Federating means that all federated traffic will be propagated to Meta servers in due course, and we all know Meta has zero intention of being bound by any agreements in regard to the data of others, regardless of what platitudes they mouth.
On a personal level, I don’t give a shit whether lemmy.world federates with Threads, but only because I have already made the decision personally not to participate in ANYTHING Meta, and that includes here on the Fediverse.
I’m already here because Reddit pulled that same shit, and I walked away then too. I learned my lesson. No way will I knowingly cross that line into personally investing time and attention into what Meta could wall off at any time and monetize without recourse for anyone who does make that mistake.
And I’d rather they not have my data, but it’s not like I’m in any position to stop or prevent it. Best I can do is stay away from all Meta products, apps, trackers, and cookies.
TL;DR: People can do what they want with Threads, federate or don’t, participate or don’t, just know that Meta can and will wall it off at any time and expect participants to pay in some way to continue.
If this wasnt needed we wouldnt even think about doing it.
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.
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.
That doesn’t sound correct. If it were, what would be the point of the block instance feature?
It’s to block all posts from that instance, which I think is not enough.
So it blocks all posts from that instance but not all users? What is the difference as I still see none of their users posts, which is the point isn’t it? I’m genuinely not understanding.
You can still see their comments, unlike when your instance defederates from their instance. For some people, the ability to completely block all interaction with an instance is important.
We’re talking Lemmy or Mastodon? Because I’m talking Mastodon.
exactly. it’s pointless.
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
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.
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.
SO FAR
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 Fediverse instances 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.
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.
I’d argue the system is working quite well, every 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.
every individual and/or community has the liberty to choose what to do about Meta.
Untrue. Users cannot decide which instances they see.
of course they can. if they don’t like their instance’s policies, they just have to move to another. or host their own.
there has been people in pro-threads instances that have moved to one that blocks threads and the other way around.
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space. If you don’t agree that is fine, genuinely I think it is good there is a diversity of opinions here, but it is pretty obvious to me that if we don’t have a lot of conversations about the importance of solidarity in defending the fediverse from corporate capture then history is just going to repeat itself.
…I am tired of history repeating itself, I like this place. I like you!
We can’t stop a massive corporation from interacting with open source, but we can choose whether massive corporations are allowed to get away with pretending they are benign members of an open source, federated community. At the very least, it raises the dollar amount these corporations must allocate in trying to convince us they are benign doesn’t it?
They have the money and time to convince us, even if you disagree with everything I say you can’t argue it isn’t a better strategy to be difficult to convince. Massive corporations will spend money and time up to the point marketing calculates the change in public perception is worth it and not a dollar further. They wouldn’t be doing their jobs well if they behaved otherwise and judging by how desirable those jobs are I feel like at least some of those people are pretty good at their jobs…
“No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space.”
But therein lies the problem. The fediverse isn’t one homogenous entity. Although there seems to be an overall leftie tint to much of the fediverse, opinions on what is" valued" and “positive” vary quite a bit. The beauty of the fediverse is that you can choose your experience based on the instance you join. Trying to control the entire fediverse goes against the point of the fediverse imo.
I don’t think trying to control is the best way of looking at it. There’s a hive mind about the fediverse that has a purpose, that wants to protect it as part of the identity of it. So a collective of instances banding together to keep that intact seems right up its alley.
Call me a pessimist, but people are caring way too much about the idealistic implementation of the technology and missing the fact that the tech doesn’t mean shit compared to the community. If you don’t care about the community growing, then that’s one thing. But if you do, Threads is the competition that you won’t be able to beat if they feel like putting in the effort.
You say well we have to be pragmatic because threads/meta has so much more power than us that we will be able to reach so many more people with their help (or they could destroy us equally as powerfully)…. I say but wait a minute if they have all that power why is it shitty open source software projects with several orders of magnitude less funding than Meta are providing the vision of the future AND the technology to get us there? I mean sure if we just had the vision that might make sense but we already built the tools too…?
Honestly stop and think about why that is. Meta could have easily funded side projects and paid programmers to rewrite the code for the entire fediverse and all its associated softwares… many times over. Given the amount of money it has it could have done this over and over and over and over again and still be only spending a tiny fraction of its R&D budget. You have to convincingly explain to me why we were the ones who had to do it, through basically entirely volunteer work, and what makes you think engaging with them now AFTER we put in most of the groundwork to build the technology is a good idea.
You say we could get us so much growth, but every single damn person they bring us will still be the product for their true customers (advertisers etc) and from those people’s perspectives nothing meaningful will have changed. The relationship between meta and its users will be essentially the same, meta has to ensure this to protect their bottom line. So people will have joined the fediverse without actually joining it, who cares at that point?
There are a million ways meta can extend and embrace the fediverse, we need to prepare for the extinguish.
we need to prepare for the extinguish
And my entire point is you can’t. The system is designed to allow anyone in, you can’t decided to stop someone because they are a corporation. It’s similar to people trying to stop the NSA from committing anything to the Linux kernel because you’re afraid they’re going to put in a backdoor. It can’t be done by design.
My point is that you can, by raising awareness about what massive corporations ALWAYS attempt to do to public commons and by encouraging everyone to defederate with them.
Sure they can contribute to and use open source, doesn’t mean we have to treat them like they are actually well meaning members of the community?
Not having a central authority means you have no real power to stop someone
This is demonstrating the exact opposite. Community organization is valid.
But… the majority are federated? And if counted by affected users I don’t even know how large they federated majority is since the biggest instances are all federated iirc.
Either way I think it’s good that we can at least choose our own experience by selecting which instance to join.
We’ll see. I don’t think you can beat a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion users if they are motivated enough.
anti-meta activism is not a bad thing at all. The billionaire corps have their marketing teams, individuals and communities have their activism. Everyone can listen to both and take an informed decision.
They are just that, activists, informing everyone about a possible issue. There’s nothing wrong with that. They are not enforcing anything on anyone.
The worst that can happen is that if your instance admin decides to ban Threads and you want to federate with Threads, you’ll have to switch instances. Not a big deal. You’ll still be able to interact with the Fediverse, it’s not like you were in Twitter, you had to leave and now you’ve lost all your contacts there.
The worst that can happen is that if your instance admin decides to ban Threads and you want to federate with Threads, you’ll have to switch instances.
Honestly, the lack of cross-instance account portability is one of the major issues that I think the Fediverse has today.
I’d rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.
between Mastodon instances it’s quite easy and painless. everything else is kind of a mess.
I’d rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.
that would be very useful and a fairly good solution.
I don’t see moving instances as this simple thing that everyone else does. Until I can bring my comments and subscriptions over instantly it’s a huge waste of time. Regular users aren’t going to do that. I’m on my third instance already and almost didn’t make the third jump due to the annoyance of adding them all again.
I meant on Mastodon, where it is that simple. After all, it makes more sense since they are both microblogging.
In Lemmy it’s a bit of a hassle, but the devs were working on it.
Haven’t really done much with Mastadon, I always liked following topics over people, and when I last tried it was still firmly people based.
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.
If you consider each instance as the “person” it’s essentially libertarianism.
No, each instance is more like a country with it’s own laws, and trade agreements with other countries to share or block content.
Nah, the Fediverse is based on freedom of association while most people live in countries they were born in and leaving one is really hard in most cases. Not to mention that ‘self-hosting’ a state just for yourself would be considered an extremism by existing states.
The Fediverse is clearly a libertarian idea.
In real life you’re probably not traversing three or more countries in a single day. You’re much closer to small communities at this scale, and having all these differences at that level is terrible for community building. Reddit was complicated enough with subreddit specific rules for regular people. Now you may not be able to find the same content as your friend if they signed up for a different instance, which is suggested as a feature not a bug. It’s exactly the same time of idealism without thoughts of consequence that libertarianism has.
I was going to use communities as my examples due to the relatively small size of each, but decided country was a better metaphor due to each instance’s ability to fully control their own rules or “laws”, where as communities in the real world are usually beholden to the higher laws of their countries.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
Sure, to a certain extent. But having an ability to opt out is far healthier than the walled gardens we have now.
In theory. In reality you’re bringing feather dusters to a nuclear bomb fight. A handful of hobbyists hosting instances with how many users? Couple hundred thousand? Against a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion people? Yea good luck with that.
How do you think this works? Yes, Meta will partake in the Fediverse. No one is trying to stop that. That chart won’t get to 100% and no one cares if it does. People are just ensuring that there’s a place where Meta won’t be, and you don’t need billions to do that.
Look at a pie chart of “internet users of x type platform” from pre fediverse. If original internet dies and fedi does take off, it will be the same chart but they will be instances instead of www sites. There are still plenty of those prefacebook, premyspace forums on the www, it’s just only a few people use them.
There already is that someone, it’s the owner of the .world instances.
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.
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.
That’s the tolerance paradox by another name.
correct.
FYI the 41% of instances that block or limit Threads (from the source data which doesn’t have every instance), accounts for 24% of the user base of the fediverse.
Still too few
If you don’t like it, just move to an instance that defederates
Just what I did.
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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”.
I was with you in the first half…
Filipino looooool
I Gott admit… “Filipino Stickfighting” sounded like it was a real Piece of existing Software 🫣
I binged enough Zizek to think that I understand Hegel better than Hegel himself.
Slobneedajob Sizzlek
java is oracle
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.
Could somebody explain what “fedipact” means?
An organized group of fediverse admins all united at not federating with Meta, i.e. against federation and also united in this goal
You should know that list isn’t entirely accurate. My instance is listed despite the owner never having signed the petition and remaining undecided.
Thanks for the heads up!
That sounds toxic af.
I mean, groups glomming up to push particular ideas or concerns are probably part and parcel of having a federated network with people independently operating servers. Various people are going to have various views on content. Some Usenet servers wouldn’t forward content of particular types and all that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal
There Is No Cabal (abbreviated TINC[1]) is a catchphrase and running joke found on Usenet.[2] The journalist Wendy M. Grossman writes that its appearance on the alt.usenet.cabal FAQ reflects conspiracy accusations as old as the Internet itself.[3] The anthropologist Gabriella Coleman writes that the joke reveals “discomfort over the potential for corruption by meritocratic leaders”.[2]
The phrase There Is No Cabal was developed to deny the existence of the backbone cabal, which members of the cabal denied. The cabal consisted of operators of major news server newsgroups, allowing them to wield greater control over Usenet.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal
The backbone cabal was an informal organization of large-site news server administrators of the worldwide distributed newsgroup-based discussion system Usenet. It existed from about 1983 at least into the 2000s.[citation needed]
The cabal was created in an effort to facilitate reliable propagation of new Usenet posts. While in the 1970s and 1980s many news servers only operated during night time to save on the cost of long-distance communication, servers of the backbone cabal were available 24 hours a day. The administrators of these servers gained sufficient influence in the otherwise anarchic Usenet community to be able to push through controversial changes, for instance the Great Renaming of Usenet newsgroups during 1987.[1]
During most of its existence, the cabal (sometimes capitalized) steadfastly denied its own existence; those involved would often respond “There is no Cabal” (sometimes abbreviated as “TINC”'[5]).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_Death_Penalty
On Usenet, the Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) is a final penalty that may be issued against Internet service providers or single users who produce too much spam or fail to adhere to Usenet standards. It is named after the death penalty (the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for a crime), as it causes the banned user or provider to be unable to use Usenet, essentially “killing” their service. Messages that fall under the jurisdiction of a Usenet Death Penalty will be cancelled. Cancelled messages are deleted from Usenet servers and not allowed to propagate. This causes users on the affected ISP to be unable to post to Usenet, and it puts pressure on the ISP to change their policies. Notable cases include actions taken against UUNET, CompuServe, and Excite@Home.
To be effective, the UDP must be supported by a large number of servers, or the majority of the major transit servers. Otherwise, the articles will propagate throughout the smaller, slower peerings.
Regardless of one’s position on whether this particular case is warranted – I certainly am not sure that it is – my guess is that at some point, one is likely going to have people trying to form groups of instance operators to put pressure on other instance operators. Has happened before, probably will continue to do so.
That’s just organization of independent actors wishing to push a message together. In a way, it is beautiful. I wish it wouldn’t be message to defend and block and close out, but that’s the current realities and worries of the Fedi.
I left Facebook to get away from the brain rot. Please don’t bring their demographic to spread here.
Allowing threads to federate is like allowing a virus to enter the system.
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.
Yeah, the color scheme is the real clue there. It’s pretty subtle what their viewpoint is.
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.
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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.
I don’t think I’d expect political neutrality from the admin of a website literally called “veganism” anyway.
You shouldn’t expect it from ANY site really.
Thanks for the clarification, your second to last line says it all. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that many online lack critical thinking skills and/or don’t consider the source when browsing. Better to accommodate the lowest common denominator when possible…but to expect that from a biased, private site is asking a lot IMHO.
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Ehm… Shouldn’t Fediverse be… Open?
What is the share of users that those 41% have?
What’s wrong with threads? I’m out of the loop.
Threads is Meta, one of the largest corporate enshitifiers on the internet - the crap most of us fled from that landed us in the fediverse in the first place.
…it’s userbase is a relative ocean compared to the fediverse’s drop, so the immediate concern is being able to moderate the tsunami of submissions; the long term concern is that things go peachy at first and the fediverse becomes so intertwined with Meta that it becomes functionally dependent on it… and then Meta decides to pull the plug, effectively destroying the parts of the fediverse that didn’t defederate right out of the gate. This is called “EEE” or “embrace, extend, extinguish” as others have mentioned in this thread. It’s a shitty thing bigger tech can do to destroy budding competition before it has a chance to become actual competition. Google has a history of it, and a lot of folks here naively think Meta will for some reason handle things more ethically.
Ok yea, fuck Meta and Facebook.
I think we should pressure public figures and governments to use non-threads profiles. That way if they pull the plug, there’s a loss to their own platform.
a lot of folks here naively think Meta will for some reason handle things more ethically.
Yeah it’s way easier to win arguments when you make up your opponent’s position in your mind
Nobody thinks Meta will be ethical.
We just think federation will be good for the Fediverse regardless.
Stop. Defending. Zuckerberg.
Start. Learning. To. Read.
Just to be clear, you think (regardless of your rationale) that it’s not a problem if threads/meta integrates more into the fediverse, correct?
If it becomes a problem, the fediverse can cut the bridge when they need to. No sense doing it pre-emptively.
It’s owned by meta/facebook
It’s just a mob-mentality.
Make your own decisions, which these people clearly don’t want you to do.
How do I know if my
insuranceinstance blocked threadsCall GEICO.
“hi, yes, Geico? Are Zuckerberg-defenders in my internet forums today? If so, I’d like to extend my anti-wanker policies”
Go to lemmy.world/instances and scroll down to “Blocked instances”. If “threads.net” doesn’t show up in that list then they haven’t blocked them.
Thanks for sharing this.
Perhaps I will be able to find a more-tolerant instance in the ‘blocked instances’ should the need arise.
Well, they aren’t blocking it now.
The instance I use – lemmy.today, located US West Coast – has an explict part of the server policy that they want to try avoiding defederation with instances, and at the moment, have no blocked instances.
I’ve got no idea where you’re located, but if that’s near you and lemmy.world does block something that you don’t want blocked, might as well try lemmy.today.
Thank you for sharing.
I’ll be checking this out for sure.
This metric seems kind of meaningless if it doesn’t account for the size of the user base
