I’m pasting an old comment of mine from the official lemmy.world post discussing potential future federation with threads/meta:
I would like to start by expressing my sincere gratitude and appreciation for the hard work you’ve done with lemmy.world. But I am strongly opposed to federating with Threads. Please read this comment in full, as I believe it outlines the sentiment and reservations held by many within our community.
I think it might be helpful to use an analogy that I think will help express the feelings of many of those within our community regarding the problem with the “wait and see” approach.
What’s to say Threads won’t follow in their very well-established footprints under Meta as a company?
If I go to a friend’s house and their child spits in my face every time, I don’t want to go to my friend’s house. I tell them this. The friend again says, “Well this time just might be different, let’s just wait and see!” Meanwhile, this kid spits in my face without fail, every chance they get. There is a very consistent and pervasive pattern of this.
Why should I believe this kid won’t spit in my face all of a sudden, when they’ve taken every single chance they could repeatedly, knowing that it was wrong and not caring what repercussions would befall them? Do you really think this kid is going to refrain from spitting in my face this time?
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -
Albert Einstein-someone.Meta/FB have continually demonstrated their core business practices are unethical and that they will continue carrying them out without regard for laws or their users’ well-being. There’s no reason to wait and see. It’s not logical to believe this time will be different.
Threads would bring such a large influx of hateful, racist, violent, bigoted political extremists to the fediverse. They will also do whatever they can to exploit users on this site for their own gain. Their modus operandi has been to exploit their users.
Instead of just conjecture and analogies, I will now provide factual information regarding Meta’s practices as a company.
This really should be obvious by now… but Meta mines and sells their user’s information. Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads… That alone should tell you there’s no reason to “wait and see.” Just look right now. They haven’t changed…
FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. Their first published research was where they manipulated users’ feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!
Meta has played a very key role in spreading misinformation, perpetuating dangerous conspiracy theories, and radicalizing the alt right. This is present across nations, but it certainly contributed heavily to the climate of political extremism that led to a mass of insurrectionists to attempt to overthrow my duly elected government…
I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:
-
Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];
-
Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;
-
Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;
-
Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;
-
Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and
-
Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design.
I ask you now if you truly believe this is the sort of player you want on the Fediverse? Do you really want to federate lemmy.world with such a blatantly immoral and detrimental corporation?
I have really enjoyed my time here on Lemmy.world and have so greatly appreciated the hard work of you and your team. I have been donating to you to help with the costs of running this instance.
However, federating with Threads contradicts my philosophy and ethical principles, and I will be sadly canceling my donations and finding a new home should we federate with Threads in the future. I firmly believe that most users on lemmy.world share this sentiment. I hope this comment helped express the resistance and fears of our community.
Once again, I appreciate all the work you guys have done. But I respectfully and severely dissent on this issue.
I made this profile picture to those who want to show their support to this cause:
You can also read my post I made for the programming.dev instance here. https://programming.dev/post/497263
The 2 articles in the linked post were very informative. Thanks for sharing!
you’re welcome
Einstein never said that:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/?amp=1TIL. Edited my comment to be more accurate.
wasnt that a quote from Far Cry 3?
The quote is far older than Far Cry 3.
okay, do you know where it’s originally from?
Nope, I always heard or it being attributed to Einstein too. But this random site says it’s from a 1983 book.
And it’s a completely false statement, to boot.
Well now you can block instances yourself. So no point in bannkng it for all…
-
Short sighted mistake. Terrible Idea.
Adopt, Extend, DestroyEmbrace, Extend, Extinguish. That’s the game plan. It’s worked so many times in the past.Embrace Extend Extinguish*
That’s what I was thinking of!
It only works if people stop using Mastodon once Threads stops federating. ActivityPub is dead they will say.
Yeah and I’m not going to stop using my instance I love it to much, Maybe I will boot up my own personal one if anything. Just glad more people will hopefully understand and can use the Fediverse
When the big corporations leave people just need to reist the “oh the user numbers are so small now, the Fediverse must be outdated” fallacy. Just like XMPP. Still works great, we just need people to use it instead of the silos which are popular now.
People need to reject the idea that “bigger number = better service”. The big players like that line of thinking because it cements their role of dominance and discourages competition. The fediverse will never be as big as Meta and it’s all the better for it. IDK about others but I prefer a small, active userbase with interests similar to my own over an ocean of crap
They don’t need to do that when the fedi is a thousandth of the size of their social networks lol. It’s hilarious that you think they need our user base.
They don’t care about the user base we have today. They want to eliminate the potential user base we may have in a decade.
It’s not so much about wanting this user base as it is eliminating potential competition and maybe stamping out a place on the internet where people can freely and openly communicate.
100%
Implementing ActivityPub at their scale costs way more than allowing a drop-in-the-bucket network to go on existing. The fediverse is not really competition for them
You can’t really Embrace, Extend, Extinguish an open standard. Anybody can continue to use the unextended version and that’s exactly what would happen if Meta tried it. They can’t force servers to update or implement meta-specific features
You could say the same thing about any EEE strategy against anything not proprietary. However, evidently it works.
No it doesn’t because you can’t extinguish a publically available standard when anybody can write their own software. XMPP is the horror story used to warn about EEE, but it still exists. The fediverse is a small network right now. If Meta tried to EEE it, server admins who don’t want to participate in a Meta-controlled network would not implement Meta’s extensions. The network would splinter into a Meta-fediverse and the actual fediverse, which would be smaller than it is now but still exist as a free and open network that could continue to grow.
They can’t turn off our servers, or force us to implement their tech, or stop us from implementing freedom/privacy preserving features.
EDIT: The reason EEE did so much damage to XMPP was because most users weren’t aware of it. XMPP got so big because non-tech savvy users didn’t even know they were using it. So when Google starting phasing it out users didn’t even realize it, they only maybe realized they couldn’t talk to one or two people now. But the fediverse has always been an explicit alternative to corporate social media and advertised that it is built on open standards that are not controlled by corporations. Its one of the key factors in a lot of the userbase’s decision to be here. If a split were to happen, that would leave the remaining open fediverse still large enough to sustain itself (even if its smaller than it is at this moment).
Meanwhile tinfoil hats bitching when open standards are being adopted…
We should treat them like any other instance. If they are a good citizen of the Fediverse they stay, otherwise they will be blocked and nothing has changed.
If they are a good citizen of the Fediverse
They haven’t been a good citizen of the internet, why would you even give them a chance?
The only explanation for someone getting back in line to get kicked in the balls for the 15th time in the row is the must really like getting kicked in the balls
Mastodon users can already block entire domains. Unless it’s legally required, there’s hardly a reason why the admins would need to take the decision away from the users.
The whole point is that instance owners/admin are allowed to run their instance however they want
The whole point is that instance owners/admin are allowed to run their instance however they want
Absolutely. My comment wasn’t about mandating an all open policy to all instance admins. Just saying that they don’t have to make such decisions for their users. It’s different on Lemmy where per user instance blocking will only come in the next release, so for now Lemmy admins kinda have to make such decisions on the behalf of users as well.
I agree. Everyone should be able to decide for themselves. My only concern is that Fediverse servers will suddenly become expensive to host because of the Threads traffic. But this would also happen with many users on many smaller instances and is not specific to Threads.
Servers pull content based on subscriptions (follows). Meta can’t push content into the Fediverse.
No ActivityPub is explicitly push-based. If you follow someone on a remote server, the remote server pushes their posts to your server. Meta can push content into the fediverse, but like any other user/server they can be blocked if its spammy
I think we’re talking about two different things. I’m saying that servers ultimately choose what they receive. People worry that Meta will flood Mastodon with unwanted content but content has to be invited in. Although it’s more accurate to say that users have to be invited in, like vampires, to serve content. People seem worried that federating means inviting in all the vampires.
When users on server A follow a single user on server B, it doesn’t matter if server B has one user or ten billion, server A receives content from one user. The only way to receive all content from a server is to have at least one person following every user on the remote server.
So Meta can’t flood Mastodon with unwanted content because you only receive content from users you explicitly ask to receive it from. You aren’t connected to the firehose when you federate with their instance.
I think the point is too many users following threads users as is it more likely to find a friend there than on Fediverse for example. Which will require more compute resources and storage
Same with kbin users
Admins host, users don’t. It’s not the users’ decision.
If the admin decides not to block them it’s the users’ decision. And users can choose not to use instances who block Threads.
Right? You don’t have to join or even engage with Threads if you don’t want to. Super easy to block an instance. But this brings a massive userbase and serious support to Mastodon. I’m a huge FOSS supporter and this is how the Fediverse not only survives, but thrives and grows - buy in from big players. Otherwise, when X/Twitter inevitably dies, another proprietary app takes its place. We just have to hold them accountable and educate users that there are Fedi apps outside Threads.
Agreed. The entire point of this federation and it is being essentially burned because someone wants to join.
I’ll use a very loose and likely wrong political analogy.
If a right wing group says the left wing are not inclusive and blocking certain people from joining. The left wing denies this and says anyone can join. So a right wing member tries to join and the left wing says “sorry not you”.
Let threads join. Don’t subscribe to any of their communities. Simple.
Honestly? I don’t trust Meta, but I like that they’re implementing federation.
It will allow me to follow famous people or brands that only have a Threads account through the privacy of my Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever app, so I’m not forced to use Meta’s official apps, which are famously riddled with trackers and whatnot.
I didn’t think about that. One to many brand marketing. One might even call it… web 1.0
The fact that this is possible tells me that functionality will be phased out. No shot Meta would leave all that theoretical cash on the table.
Sure but then anyone whose ever interacted with you, outside of Meta, will be susceptible to Meta’s privacy issues even if they block you or are only on instances that block threads because their previous comments will be on your content. At least from my understanding, that’s how defederating and blocking goes. If I’m wrong, let me know but if not it’s going to get hard knowing who we can interact with in the fediverse if they’re also interacting with threads.
It’ll look the same way it does interacting with different mastodon instances.
I think we can give facebook/threads the bad end of the bargin IF we have a data protections.
You know how powerful copy-left was for open source? I think we can do the same for Lemmy servers. We can have users agree (formally) that the data on a particular server cannot be used for training llvm’s advertisements, marketing profiles, etc, and make it legally binding.
Even if we don’t federate with them, Meta can still harvest the data so we should add these protections regardless. Maybe there is already something like this and I’m just unaware of it.
If we do add these protections and we ensure that the largest instance (e.g. Lemmy.world) is community controlled, I think it could work well for bringing more content to Lemmy.
Yep, on a public forum like this we lose very little on privacy by federating with them. What we do stand to lose is comment and post quality, but that’s trivial to fix by simply blocking threads on a personal level.
You can scrape Lemmy instances for training data without even running an instance.
Yeah, sorry if I’m not great at communicating. That’s exactly what I’m trying to point out when I said:
Even if we don’t federate with them, Meta can still harvest the data so we should add these protections regardless.
That’s the thing, anything public is fair game. This is why Reddit is ruining their API.
It’s not fair game for for-profit bussinesses training LLM’s. That’s part of why Reddit made the move; so that companies would need to pay Reddit for access to the data for legally training models
They changed the terms and made the API pay to use for large volumes of use. People using it to train models have already pillaged what they need and you can get the data prior to APIgeddon elsewhere.
Sure, but it’s still true that there are legal protections we can add that make it not fair game for Lemmy. At best it would be unfair-game (illegal scraping of Lemmy)
A rule for one Lemmy or even the Lemmy app doesn’t mean same rule applies across ActivityPub Federation, if your data federated to my instance, it’s mine too.
As long as they keep their shitty ads on their side i’m fine with it.
I’m really curious how they will approach this. If you can use threads with any other apps, ads free, won’t people just do that?
Right now, if you want to comment on a non-threads user, you have to leave the app. I doubt this will change unless they’ve figured out a way to control the flow.
So threads is even worse than any FOSS app?
My wish is that we could maybe turn this against facebook(mEtA) and actually get threads users to use other instances. Maybe its possible idk i hope so.
Threads users are basically boomers. They wouldn’t understand federation and instances.
Make it as easy, or preferably easier, to sign up for other instances as it is the threads instance. If we can clear that hurdle, we’d have a chance at getting many of them.
True but You do realize that the whole things is community based unlike Facebook that has trillion dollar at their disposal. Guys like you and me use the free stuff and give advice on reddit and Lemmy but in real life we can’t even write a single line of code. Lol
This is growth for the sake if it? “Chance we getting many of them”?
No outside and lick some public benches, you’ll have a great chance of getting splinters in your tongue and many of them diseases! Go! you need more! Go!
This is an old article but: https://wedistribute.org/2023/08/threads-new-terms-affects-the-fediverse/
I can’t find any current stats on threads, but it had a severe cliff drop not long after it launched. Meta’s Twitter rival Threads sees steep drop in daily users by 80 per cent, report says
Total users of the fediverse is about 13 million: https://fediverse.observer/stats
he’s not wrong. the migration of the queer community from twitter to threads is great plus i had a great time talking about doctor who over the weekend, it genuinely felt like twitter 2010 again. ive never had that much engagement from mastodon so if federation from threads to mastodon can keep that up, it will be a win win for all users.
if a mastodon instance was fine with hosting libsoftiktok it would swiftly be defederated for lack of moderation by a large amount of instances. No questions asked. No debate. Why is this any different? Do the rules somehow not apply when we’re dealing with facebook?
I think federation with Meta will improve Mastodon, and doesn’t affect Lemmy too much. Threads users will be able to post to our groups, but the discussion will be mostly within communities on existing servers.
The worry is if the bulk of discussion happens in Meta’s space. Yes, people will feel like they are missing out if they are on a Masto server defederated with Meta, but there is enough activity from people outside of that to be engaging. On the Lemmy side, (hypothetically) if Facebook Groups were to become like Lemmy communities, I’d be very concerned that most of the discussion would move away from places like here on lemmy.world and other cool servers to Meta’s. Then by the time Meta decides to leave or do something stupid then people will not have a place to go to.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko lauds Threads’ entry into the decentralized social media space, saying the move will make Mastodon — the open source Twitter/X rival — “a far more attractive option.” Mastodon’s app, which is powered by the decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub, has gained more attention in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, a network that’s been since renamed X to reflect Musk’s ambitions to turn the microblogging platform into an everything app encompassing creators, payments, video, live audio, and shopping.
Those unhappy with Twitter’s changes have been scoping out other platforms, including Mastodon, an open source alternative, as well as challengers from other startups like Spill, Spoutible, Post, Bluesky, and others.
Rochko has been largely positive about having the tech giant embrace ActivityPub and decentralized social media, having earlier said, “The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers.”
As the integration goes live, Rochko touted the move as “exciting,” and “huge for Mastodon,” saying in a post on the platform that it’s a “step towards the interoperable social web that we’ve been advocating for.”
In addition, he points out that having access to all Threads users from a Mastodon account makes the app more attractive, considering its other perks.
That same argument is being made by the Mastodon third-party client, Mammoth, backed by Mozilla, which believes that its app will offer a competitive user interface that will be more approachable for newcomers to decentralized social media, and a viable alternative to Threads, including for those users who don’t want to create an account with Meta.
The original article contains 686 words, the summary contains 285 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Kumbaya vibe
I hope that it doesn’t change the fediverse for the worst. On the one hand there will likely be a lot more willingness for the general populus to dip their toes into the fediverse if meta is adopting it. Lack of fediverse adoption isn’t a technical problem but rather an unwillingness to download another app because it isn’t the hot new thing. I don’t think it will take long for a good chunk of their user base to see that both the threads app and their instance is just objectively a lot worse of an experience than practically anything else you’ll see in the fediverse, and it will shed a lot of light on some really great projects and will almost certainly see a lot of growth in specific areas that the fediverse needs it and there will probably be less of a feeling of “shouting into the void” when you post on mastodon, for instance. but I don’t agree with the decision to allow meta to federate with us.
A lot of people who argue for meta integrating with the fediverse tend to see this as like, “oooh cringe reddit wojak gatekeeping” And I don’t think any of our userbase is trying to gatekeep the fediverse. Ultimately meta is a disgusting company and for profit mega corporations that take advantage of kids don’t mix with “ordinary people trying to make a good platform for themselves and others because they can, no strings attached” To put simply, good community is a very delicate thing and a relatively small userbase like the fediverse being exposed to this much toxicity and pressure from a multi billion dollar company that has its own ideas for this platform doesn’t seem like something we need to expose ourselves to as a community. Something in particular that bothers me about this (so far, at least) is that meta’s ActivityPub “integration” is unidirectional, so as of now it’s using the fediverse to effectively just advertise their platform. There is nothing in their roadmap that inherently suggests that they are planning to add polydirectional integration, which sounds like a very meta thing to do. Isn’t meta an advertising company ? Aren’t there adds on threads ? If threads catches on then so will brands and more advertisers. Will we have a solution to stop ads from appearing on non threads apps? Food for thought. I think it’s a bad idea to poison this flowering community. And that’s exactly what this decision is, no matter how you look at it.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I wouldn’t mind followers-only federation of Threads. My issue would be that the flow of posts from there (if it reaches the federated timeline anyway) would be a burden for moderation.
The Eternal September is coming, as it always does.
Me too!
I see this going only a few directions:
- Threads tries and fails
- Threads succeeds, flexes, annexes
- Equilibrium, and Mastodon/Lemmy become the social network APIs that connect across (like I wish we’d had when G+ was a thing)
