Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you’re a server admin, please defederate Meta’s domain “threads.net”
If you don’t run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate “threads.net”.
Yeah dude let’s just federate with an instance maintained by a corporation that has undoubtedly caused a genocide in Myanmar by turning a blind eye to a far-right hate speech group that caused an entire fucking minority to flee into another country.
I don’t get why people are supporting and saying “oh it must be up to the user” like bro this is the company we’re dealing with. Fuck that fuck threads fuck zuckerberg i don’t want his shit cancer near something that’s going well so far.
Please explain how federating with Threads is “supporting Meta” and not the opposite.
I’m not sure if federating will help meta so much as it will definitely (most probably) hurt the lemmy/mastodon network.
Here’s a similar case that happened before, with the XMPP protocol being coopted by google but eventually killing it in favor of their own proprietary solution:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Big tech isn’t on our side, and we have to handle outside corporate influence with heavy skepticism.
XMPP still exists and doesn’t have any fewer users than before Google adopted it.
Excuse me sir, i cant be more agree with you
me too ^_^
Israel have been successfully pressuring meta to remove and shadow ban accounts sympathetic to Palestinians. The level of censorship is crazy.
OK, I’ll bite. You got something more substantial than “I read it on the internet” to back that up? One reputable source on your accusation? Not sayin’ you’re lying/wrong, just asking for some verifiable proof.
Numerous actual popular accounts and news sources have been suspended. It was major news in the Arabic-speaking world in October. Meta even apologized for auto-translating Palestinian as “terrorist.”
Hate to say it but that’s a fail on producing a reliable source.
Did you want specific accounts?
Palestinian Shebab News Agency has facebook pages shut down
@Eye.on.palestine on IG suspended by Meta, then back up after a backlash.
#IStandWithPalestine and #FreePalestine getting censored by Facebook
Thanks, that’s much better.
You know, you have access to search engines too. You don’t need to be lazy and treat the rest of the Internet as your personal stenographer/research assistant.
Fucking HELL, despite how increasingly easy it is to find information, it cannot keep pace with just how utterly fucking lazy people are getting.
At the moment this is coming from secondary sources from within meta so there are no articles about it that I’m aware of. But Palestinians and activists constantly have their content removed, account reach limited, and comments removed (which has happened to me multiple times). People also have their accounts threatened and removed.
These actions are visible constantly, meta have been doing this since the start. For example, when you go to someone’s stories at the top it might show 4 or 5 stories, but when you click through to their profile there’ll be 20+.
Some people I follow don’t even show up at the top anymore and I have to access their stories via their profile page or if I’ve messaged them recently.
After (as of this reply) eight hours, you have produced nothing more than anecdotal evidence if not outright invented. I must assume at this point you are spreading disinformation for whatever your goals may be to that end.
Thank you for wasting everybody’s time.
If they want to hang out with us, they can make an account somewhere other than thread, bam, done!
If they want to hang out with us, they can make an account somewhere other than thread, bam, done!
“make another account somewhere” isn’t really what federation is about.
Indeed it is, they’re not saying you have to make an account on that person’s server, they’re saying that you can make it on a different server, that’s the point of federation you can join other servers that are connected to them. It’s not to be fully open without any limitations, because if it were then content moderation would be impossible.
Services like Nostr have this problem, they are like the wild West where anything goes and you can’t do anything about it. To some people that seems great but the fact of the matter is those services are filled with right-wing trolls and crypto scammers (likely plenty of other nasty stuff as well) because they cannot be moderated.
deleted by creator
please take a look at the replies under zuck’s own post in threads.net and determine if that’s the type of content you want.
for those who don’t want to visit, majority of the commentators are bots. some advertising crypto, and others asking for money.
even if you think you can individually block those accounts, keep in mind the size of threads compared to fediverse.
for Lemmy: monthly active users are barely150K40K, while for threads it’s 100 million. there’s no chance you can control that inflow of bots.and if it still doesn’t convince you, you can read threads’ privacy policy, which states that they’ll gather all that pii if you interact with their content.
most of the internet is already bigtech, I don’t want Lemmy to become another arm of it. though I have faith in my instance maintainer and dessalines, the dev.
Comment stolen from user “copygirl” from blahaj.zone:
Looks like they’ll be harvesting your data if you follow anyone from Threads, maybe even injecting ads. Unsure what happens to the data of people that get followed by a Threads user. A large part of the fediverse is here precisely because they want to escape corporate meddling, data-hoarding, advertising and other anti-user malpractices. There’s a number of people talking about this, here’s a recent post that highlights some of the things from their TOS.
It’s not as if something was preventing them from
data-hoarding
and
harvesting your data
here anyway.
So that part about being followed by a Threads user is just a bit stupid.
The danger is in them becoming an integral part of the network where people don’t bother to register at a normal instance, and then Meta pulling out and the network remaining half-dead.
Anyone can collect the data anyway, and I’m sure at least one person out there is already harvesting our Fediverse data.
There’s a big difference between some random person and Meta collecting the data.
Who says that Meta is not already harvesting our data? Lemmy really is about moving control out of corporate hands and decentralisation advantages, but profiling is insanely easy on the Fediverse, and it really cannot be different because of its inherent interconnectedness. It makes no sense to migrate from conventional social media to Fediverse equivalents if all one cares about is privacy.
Is there any sort of legal precedent that covers a situation where:
- I am a user on a network server.
- Meta connects their server to my server so their users and I can interact.
- Am I now bound by a terms of service on Meta’s server that I have not agreed to and may have never seen or been presented with?
When I joint my instance, am I implicitly agreeing to any terms of service that exist on any instance that my instance decides to federate with?#
Lemmy and mastodon profiles are public so I don’t know if privacy concerns are a problem unique to federation with meta considering they could just scrape your profile if they wanted the data that bad. I’d be much more concerned about small instance admins losing funding as users migrate to instances that federate with meta until threads and the big instances are the only ones left on the fediverse
How can they possibly steal any data other than what you publicly shared on the internet?
In favor of defederation. If I start seeing garbage from threads in my feed, I’m switching instances. I don’t want Meta pushing their divisive, hateful, misinformation all up in my feeds. Meta will kill fedi. We don’t need them.
Yeah. I’ll switch to an instance that is defederated from Threads, if mine doesn’t.
I left Meta’s other properties to avoid state sponsored hate speech. I won’t use a platform that gives hate speech a platform.
I don’t need to wait to know if Meta will do that. I already know.
I’m onboard with this as well. I can’t imagine this instance would federeate with Threads, and I respect the admins here a lot, but I’d lose that respect and trust immediately if we aren’t smart enough to defederate from Threads. We’ve seen what happens when these tech giants get their claws in anything.
Serious question though - how would you? Meta can’t push content in your feed. The only reason you’re going to see Meta in your feed is if the community here (or people you follow on mastodon) decide they want to show it.
Why not just block the instance?
If I start seeing garbage from threads in my feed, I’m switching instances.
You can just block the domain on a per-user basis for yourself instead of trying to control content what others see just because you don’t like it.
Has that facility been added to Lemmy yet, even?
Yes, the new release came out yesterday.
lemm.ee already made the decision, based off of the voice of the community to defederate from Threads
Lemmy.Ca admins blocked Threads about 5 months ago: https://lemmy.ca/comment/901551
You can confirm that Threads dot net is still blocked by Lemmy.Ca by going to https://lemmy.ca/instances and clicking on the “Blocked Instances” tab.
Thanks, I actually forgot that one can check!
lemmy.dbzer0.com also blocked Threads
If anybody remembers XMPP being widespread and what Facebook, Google, Apple and others (say, I personally remember VK and Yandex in Russia supporting it) did to it, that’s what will happen if you “wait and see”.
EDIT: oh, half the thread is such comments
If anything meta integrates here I’m out.
Let’s not defederate from every corporate player. Some of them can probably respect reasonable rules of civility.
But fuck Meta. We already know how this plays out.
We know there’s a huge wave of hatred and misinformation incoming. We’ve seen it on their other platforms.
We should avoid making blanket demands like this to the fediverse as a whole. I happen to support your position, but we should take into account the diverse nature of the social web.
Instead of making demands, explain your reasoning and leave each community to make up their own mind. This is the beautiful nature of the social web; we have broken decision making down into many smaller units instead of one mega instance/corporation.
Find a community that resonates with your own thinking on this issue, and over time a thousand different servers will gather experiences and a picture will start to form; was federation with Meta a good or a bad thing?
How about users make decisions for themselves and block Threads if they want?
What exactly is “pushing their crap”? Chances are it will be more moderated and less arbitrary than what passes through from some lemmy instances. Hatred and misinformation? Harvesting your data? Like this isn’t already a factor with lemmy? In the Fediverse, we have admins who flagrantly break their own TOS. Plus it seems to me this is an opportunity for lemmy to get advertisement at Threads’ expense.
Defederation is cancer and it will kill Fediverse faster than any Meta.
Aside from the “moral” argument, can someone ELI5 what harm can a federated threads.net do on other users (like me) and/or instances?
the general strategie is called “embrace, extend, extinguish”. This strat is the reason, why everyone uses MS Office today
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
that reminds me of Apple with iMessage
A failed messaging system that nobody in the world uses except for the Americans?
How sweet.
Well, yes, I think that’s the one.
I think you upset the americans 😆
I’m not American and I still downvoted the asshole. Sorry. Assholes.
That’s absolutely in your right to do so.
Would you mind if I ask you what did I say that’s considered an asshole move?
I’m not following… who is american and who is an asshole
As opposed to Threads stealing all brands companies and users anyway?
There’s still advantages to a fediverse and ways to defend against “embrace extend extinguish” if you plan ahead.
We can’t complain about proprietary networks if we don’t allow others to join our own open ones.
As opposed to Threads stealing all brands companies and users anyway?
The extend-phase is when people migrate to threads, who would have stayed otherwise.
And why would you expect there to be many such people? I’d assume the intersection of people who like the Fediverse and people who like proprietary social media to be pretty small.
Why are people not allowed to do that if they want to?
You think groups that came here largely fleeing Reddit and Twitter are going to be tempted to go to threads? I doubt it very heavily. Threads is more likely to loose people to here if anything.
It’s not necessarily about a threat to instances or users. It’s more an issue with how Meta could potentially hijack the protocol the whole thing is built on, and do damage in the long run. There’s a write up here on how similar things have happened in the past;
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is what it’s about, right here. I wish more people would understand this. This is not some loose anti-coporate sentiment or senseless alarm sounding. We have example after example of how corporations like Meta, Microsoft, and Google leverage their power to consume and destroy. To say “we just need to be proactive about stopping them” is naive. We’ve said that so many times, and every time we’ve lost.
The only way to win is not to play their game. We can’t let them in in the first place.
Edit: a word
You should look into Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. I think the biggest fear is that they have so many users that they will just flood all instances with their stuff. This can, in time, lead to a situation where they can defederate from everything else and bring a lot of people with them, since most of the content will have come from Threads.
I feel though that if they were going to do that they should have done that from the beginning. A lot of the other instances now they kind of solidified themselves as big players. It would have been easy to just use Threads at the start but people have put the effort into creating accounts on other platforms now, I can’t see them going back what would be the point it would be more of it again.
No, you need some fire before you can extinguish.
So that plan at this point seems to be as far as I can understand it to be to register to a service wherever every single other user will be federate from them.
I’m sure that will work brilliantly.
… solidified themselves as big players …
You understand that the entire fediverse is a rounding error against Meta’s user base, right?
No one’s going to drop thir instance to use Meta. The whole reason that most of the people are here is because they don’t trust the big sites.
You are missing the point. And by this point I’m pretty sure you’re doing so wilfully.
They can absorb large numbers of users and communities and after a while close themselves to the outside. Meaning that once people “need” those communities they’ll have no chance other than go threads.
I got a number of answers that sound very weak to me, and basically point to a “fail” of the fediverse in its own nature if threads joins. Kind of disappointing.
To me, the key idea of the fediverse is that it’s federated and should work as a whole, no matter who joins. Most of the answers below support the opposite. They are basically saying that the fediverse should stay within the “fediverse”, which is exactly what non-federated social media are doing. Meh.
threads hab more users than fediverse on one instance
is cause centralization
Competition and success. They are just paranoid that it’ll be successful and they can’t control where the project goes without including the majority of users and then developers.
