A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.
However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don’t have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.
What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it’d be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.
What actions can we take to deal with Threads?
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Ignore it. Defederate. Defederate with any instances that chose to federate with it. Keep the fediverse small and independent. It’s nice here, let’s keep it nice.
Yeap. It doesn’t to go mainstream; it’s already successful.
I keep asking but haven’t gotten an answer, why must instances that block meta also block those that federate with META? Wouldn’t blocking META be enough, as you wouldn’t see their posta, nor users, nor comments in any way after blovking the domain?
Is this punitive or is yhere a reason I’m mising?
In a federated system, users on Alice can see and post into communities hosted on Bob, eg alice/c/funplace@bob. When Meta tries to join, Alice chooses not to federate - avoid giving meta free content, protect its users from ‘bad’ meta communities, preemptively block toxic meta users, whatever - but Bob does federate. Alice users can’t see meta/c/advertising, there’s no way to subscribe to Alice/c/advertising@meta. Both Alice and Meta users can see Bob/c/funplace, and so alice users can see anything that meta users post there and meta ‘gets’ any content that alice users contribute. Bob effectively acts like a tunnel between alice and meta users.
I got the impression that somehow your activity 3rd hand can still be passed on via the intermediary instance to Threads, and then becomes part of their dataset. I could be wrong, I’m not sure how that information gets passed on in the backend.
If you are worried about your data falling into the hands of Meta, don’t worry, they already have it. Lemmy is incredibly easy to scrape by design.
What we should be more worried about is
- Whether we can become a better and more vibrant community
- Whether we can properly advertise that we don’t track users and don’t have ads
- Whether our instances can be equally performant
This is the only way we can have a steady influx of new users.
Agreed, the data concern is a red herring. Might as well do a “I hereby revoke consent for Facebook to take my data…” post for all the good it will do you.
Block Threads because of the potential impact it can have on the quality of experience here. That’s a good enough reason. Nobody joined a lemmy so that they could keep in touch with people who use social media to gossip about brands and influencers.
Just: We absolutely must wall off Meta.
I was recently asked by my employer if we should move our social media efforts to fediverse and my recommendation was that this community it’s both too small and also would be hostile (rightly) to corporate empty posting.
As soon as threads has a web interface that’s usable I will be starting up there…
You put your recycling in the blue can, compost in the green can and your corporate garbage on Meta.
The whole idea is they should setup their own instance, and try and encourage a community there.
Governments should also setup their own lemmy/mastadon instances as well, use it for PR/interaction.
I think we got to a point in corporate comms where everyone decided we have to post at a regular interval, even when there’s nothing interesting happening.
This feela like a good time to revaluate what we do on social. I have thought about standing up an instance, but realistically we have our internal Teams that employees use… So they wouldn’t use it, and I can’t imagine myself subscribing to a bunch of company instances, so it seems like it’s an effort for nobody.
That said we often put on community events like hackathons. I think situations like that are perfect for posting on our cyber security servers.
Less white noise trash is better.
I’m going to recommend that if W3C starts accepting changes to the AP standard from Meta, the community must maintain a fork that rips out any offending parts.
The part that most concerns me is that meta is going to be able to use it’s considerable influence to fuck with AP. Although, at this point I’m 50/50 on whether they even bother with federation.
The W3C has shown in the past that it can’t be trusted not to take bribes. See alse: EME
Join the pact and not just vow but actually do defederate Threads as soon as it comes online: https://fedipact.online/
i appreciate the message but what is that ui design???
the floating hearts that go over the text. the neon pink background. the fact that this serious pact is in all lowercase (i know im typing in all lowercase, but i think the fedipact is different from an internet forum). the weird text animation for hyperlinks that makes it unreadable for a second. this does not lead to any reasonable credibility
That is what nonconformity looks like. The internet of old looked similar to this. Nowadays, everything has ample whitespace, and is boringly styled, and ads everywhere.
That would be how I look at this page.
Webpages have ample whitespace and “boring” styling for accessibility and readability. Nonconformity for the sake of nonconformity is really stupid.
I mean with boring that every website looks the same, perhaps a splash of color but thats it. And even that isn’t a guarantee for accessibility or readability. This pink website is perfectly valid and accessible.
Why?
There is literally a link on that page titled “why”…
I don’t agree with it. Lemmy won’t be affected anyhow since the use-case is so so different. We hardly interact with Mastodon. We’ll be fine.
Push celebrities, influencers, and businesses to create their own instances, outside of Meta.
If they just use a Threads account, then the Fediverse gets made irrelevant. Along come the Three E’s, and Meta walls up the garden and starts putting billboards up everywhere.
Celebrities, influencers, & businesses need to know that they can now have a social media presence that they own, rather than rent, where they can make the rules for the communities they host. It’s good for them in that it keeps their Fediverse presence theirs, they get to call the shots and choose how their instance is set up.
Because if enough people have a strong Fediverse presence outside of Threads land, it’ll make it much harder for Meta to pull the plug.
I’m doing my part here by promoting “Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
This is my instance now.
“I’m a Barbie girl, and this is MY Barbie world.”
Could we get John Oliver on board with the fediverse?
It’s a clear EEE attack. Do not federate!
Sorry, but I’m a bit out of the loop, what is an EEE attack? When I look it up all I get is eastern equine encephalitis, which I somehow doubt is related.
Thanks!
Exactly, Threads will use the Fediverse to seed content and then start to drift from the standard when they have sufficient user base that they don’t need the outside content. They will start to shift all communities to be Meta-hosted and stop advertising the others. Eventually they will just disconnect entirely.
I agree. If I want to see “VIPs”, influencers, ads or other crap like that I can still register an account over there. Also Meta’s track record is horrible…
It’s not easy to make an account unless you port over your Instagram account. I attempted to make two separate accounts, and both were suspended instantly and I couldn’t continue unless I uploaded a selfie. But I didn’t really want to use my name ¯\(◉‿◉)/¯
This makes zero sense. There is no financial incentive for an EEE attack, and these companies don’t do anything without financial incentive.
Your content isn’t original or interesting enough for meta to want it, and even if they did, they already have access to it without federation.
Threads on its own already dwarfs the entirety of the global fediverse by orders of magnitude. Anyone screaming EEE is just fucking stupid.
I assume its Embrace, extend, and extinguish. Its something Microsoft is know for and this worried me when they started to “Embrace” Linux. However, I don’t believe big tech can do much in terms of polluting open source and the fediverse.
I dont follow this much but I can see that these companies are investing into what they think the future could look like.
Might just be me…
That’s what they want you to think. (not sure if I’m being sarcastic or not)
Even if that’s true, once they become a part of the ecosystem, they will start looking for ways to dominate it. That’s just the nature of for-profit corporations.
I don’t think you need to read too much into it.
If Meta concludes that federated platforms or activitypub may one day start to eat their lunch, then the clear and obvious first step to any strategy is to have some sort of presence in the fediverse.
Honestly that’s as far as you need to go for the moment. Grab some market share and then avail yourself of opportunities as they arise.
Perhaps it will be EEE, perhaps something else.
Check out how XMPP was killed
Make an account and use chatgpt to shit post on it.
Ah, the u/spez r/programming approach. A classic.
In my opinion, the people that use Instagram and will potentially use Threads aren’t the ones who will get into the Fediverse.
They will probably not even know that this exists in the app as it just puts you directly in threads.net.
Also, there’s the option that this is just a ‘trend thing’ that will die in a week or two, probably because people won’t get used to or due to legal problems (as it’s already happening).
Edit: typo.
I dropped Instagram for Pixelfed a week or two ago. It’s a small community, but friendly and nobody is trying to sell me anything lol.
Same could be said about fediverse in general. I thought there would be more action against reddit but seems the majority of people don’t care.
I use instagram on the daily (mostly lurking). It’s very good for inspiration and updates in my hobby, which is a small community basically only on instagram. Due to how it all works and is set up its fairly impossible to move it elsewhere (for the time being).
I do like it here though, this is nice. Not gonna mess with threads at all, that’s for sure.
Threads doesn’t need to do an EEE attack. They’ve already gained many more users than the entire Fediverse. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to not join the Fediverse at all.
I would never use Threads, but I would use a Mastodon instance that federated with Threads. I already see many journalists and content creators I like trying it out, who either stopped using Mastadon long ago or never even tried it in the first place. If Threads started doing things that negatively affected my experience, I would then switch to a Mastodon instance that wasn’t federated with Threads.
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Absolutely defederate from threads immediately from anything threads related.
Threads will collect any and all data they can about users disregarding which server you are on, and not agreeing to their business practices.
There’s a reason they are not in the EU, including NI despite being in UK. And that’s probably because their practices are illegal, and don’t respect the rights of their users according to EU regulation.
The second Lemmy federates with Threads, I’m out of here.
Fun fact - GDPR is about European persons, not European servers. If an European citizen has a fediverse account on an American/African/Asian/… server and Meta collects all of their data and processes it, they are still in violation of GDPR. Locking European (Instagram) accounts out of Threads doesn’t make them comply magically with GDPR.
Good luck meta, have fun handling all those GDPR requests and proving that Europeans have consented that you suck up all their data…
But if your company is not localized in EU how they will prosecute the company?
Yeah, that’s a bit of a problem in general. But in this case we’re talking about Meta. It’s one thing, if $randomCompany from outside the EU does it. As long as they’re not doing business within the EU and not specifically target the EU as a market, then they might try to get the company and fine them and may or may not succeed.
Meta on the other hand provides service explicitly for EU citizens & companies. Not only did they localize Facebook, Instagram,… for European languages, they offer the service to sell ads for European companies. In this case, the EU can and will have a way to get them fined, I they want.
Maybe but idk if they cannot just evade it juridically since technically Threads is another company besides being owned by Meta, also they will just ip block EU users. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see Meta being fined, I just cant see this easily happening.
An EU person living in Chicago is protected by EU privacy laws.
IP blocking would only protect Meta from EU persons living in the EU.
Level fines and collect them.
What I do not understand about this take is that they can already collect all of this data, today. They don’t need to federate with the rest of the Fediverse to scrape basically all of the data they want. The only problematic thing they’d need an instance for is linking votes to users - which is something they could do just by spinning up a Lemmy instance. And they probably shouldn’t be able to, Lemmy should try to figure out a way to anonymize votes.
Threads joining the Fediverse does not significantly increase their ability to collect data about existing Fediverse denizens.
I second this, the NI/RoI/EU situation with threads is proof to me that they are for sure doing threads for only the most shady/coporately greedy reasons.
The fediverse isnt ready for widespread/user adoption. Not everything has to grow exponentially overnight (this is a big problem with modern culture IMO).
Let the fediverse develop naturally and healthily, it will shine on its own in time.
Threads will collect any and all data they can about users disregarding which server you are on
Defederating doesn’t solve this issue I think. It only stops the flow of data from Facebook to you but not the other way around.
This is an absolutely awful take. Can you imagine if you had this approach with email? You wouldn’t let your email server connect to a Gmail server or any other email server that connected to a Gmail server. That’s insane and email becomes worthless.
I know interoperability between email providers is often used to make the concept of federation more aproachable but other than that they are totally different systems.
Your sent emails aren’t published and not everyone with an email server can track your activity. Unlike lemmy if it connects to threads
Sounds like some changes should be made to the Lemmy software then if anyone can just connect and start pulling out private data about me. Mastodon doesn’t have that problem. I connect to my server and my server talks to Meta. Meta doesn’t get to see any of my private info. Just the stuff I make public.
It’s a “flaw” of the fediverse in general not about private data. As soon as two instances are federated and users interact with eachother, information like posts, comments, votes etc are shared
Yeah but that’s all public information that I’m choosing to put out there. Meta doesn’t need to do a complete integration and share posts back to the fedeverse just to grab public information. They can just scrape the sites the way they are now for most of it.
Scraping sites to gain information and spinning a web of interaction and activity are 2 different things. If your fine with Meta having this data easily available that’s on you. No one stops you from signing up with their services but most people here want to distance themselves from huge corporations and their shenanigans
Yeah people keep talking about open source and interoperability as this fragile thing that can be consumed by any sufficiently large player. It’s supposed to be less fragile, it’s supposed to be superior. If there is a bad reaction to adding such a large player, then learn from it and iterate solutions. Making tiny walled gardens has got to be the most boring experiment that I don’t care to be a part of.
Would be nice if instances had a default recommended block list, like how spam filters work. Nasty stuff is “blocked” but still accessible and I can move it out of spam if I so chose. Rather than defederating all the time
Yeah I came to Lemmy and Mastodon so I’m not living in a walled garden anymore…
Reminds me of the Bitcoin/BlackRock debate. They are trying to start an ETF, and all I can think is “Good, the more BTC is integrated into the system, the more it will change it, this is the ultimate goal”.
It’s not to say it’s without it’s risks, but if the system is not adaptive enough to work through any potential problems, it will never survive in the long run. Antifragility is a necessity of such a system.
It’s still very young here though, the Goliath is coming for David but David is still in middle school.
Not quite the same. Emails are for messages and communication between individuals, not an open internet forum with the idea of allowing people to converse and discuss freely. Its an attempt to bring back the internet golden age IMO. Allowing threads to federate opens the door to them benefiting from the content and work of the rest of the fediverse for free. This would be fine for a non scummy company, but meta will use this opportunity in the worst ways to gain power, influence, and money that they don’t deserve. All the best of the fediverse (lemmy/kbin/mastodon) was made with FOSS principles in mind, bringing people together, letting everyone have a voice, not paywalling or involving money in absolutely everything. The only reason Facebook is here for is to make profit. We should not let them
Email is not just for individuals. There are plenty of newsletters and other mass emails you can sign up for.
The fedeverse also benefits from their creators content for free too. There’s no better way to get people off of Meta than to tell people to come to Lemmy/Mastodon and you can still follow the people you want. Making people choose FOSS or the content creators they want to follow will just force them to stay on Meta.
Again, not an equal comaprison. You see all federated content in from the fediverse, you don’t have to subscribe in order to eventually see it when it is specifically sent to you. Also, I don’t subscribe to a single mailing list for anything, willing to be many others don’t.
And yes it benefits from creators content but not for profit. I would argue creators (often) will get as much out of there content being posted to the fediverse by the attention it garners them. In comparison to whenever creators’ content is posted to facebook with (often) no credit only for facebook to make the lions share of profit on that.
All this along with Facebook’s (yeah sure, say meta if you want but to me that was just PR to try to gloss over there super shit public perception) extremely poor track record on privacy, controlling mis-information (everyone seems to forget Cambridge Analytica scandal) etc. etc. and no Facebook/Meta should not be allowed anywhere near the Fediverse if we want it to be an enjoyable place on the internet.
I have already blocked threads on my household instance. I decided that I don’t want to have to trust major instance admins to take the same things seriously that I do.
I’m going to block it as a user until I find a friendly, stable instance of my favoured Fediverse flavours that blocks it for me.
There’s no persuasive argument I’ve heard for treating Meta as anything other than a rampaging horde of Huns on the attack.
I’m brand new to Lemmy (guess why, lol) and federated systems in general. How do I block all things Meta? And what does that even mean for Lemmy, where it’s an entirely different site from Facebook?
As of now, there’s no built-in means to block entire instances as a user. The only way to keep them out are to use an instance that is 2 levels separated from them, that is an instance that doesn’t federate with another instance that federates with them.
Alright, that kind of answers the “how do I block Meta bullshit?” question, but what does that mean for Lemmy? Lemmy is an entirely different site from Facebook or Threads or whatever. Or is Lemmy more like a browser to view anyone’s federated community? Then I’d get the EEE thing everyone’s talking about. You usually see your communities on Site A, but Site B offers what Site A has, but also free beer! People migrate to Site B, Site B slowly introduces ads, poisons the beer, kills your cat, and steals your wife, but Site A is a shell of it’s former self and dies out, so…you can’t unfuck what’s been fucked.
ActivityPub is the protocol that Lemmy/kbin/Mastodon use, and is the basis behind the fediverse. It’s also the same protocol that Threads uses. They’re all different site/services, but they can all interact with each other through the ActivityPub protocol, assuming they are federated to each other.
At the moment, Threads is entirely separate, as they haven’t federated with anyone, but eventually they will want to join the fediverse, and the question is whether or not to federate with them. They will always be able to view our content as it’s public, but if we federate with them we will see their content and they will be able to post content here. Keep in mind that Lemmy currently has about 70k active users, and that Threads just got 30 million+ sign-ups. We don’t know how many of those are active users, but it’s certainly more than all of Lemmy put together. If they come here, that’s going to be basically impossible to moderate.
Ahh, so if I’m on Site A, I can view and comment on things from Site B, so long as A and B are federated with one another. The worry then is basically seeing and dealing with Meta’s bullshit here, and them more or less taking over through EEE tactics. That makes sense now.
Lemmy communities aren’t federated with Meta threads by default, right? It’s opt in. So just…don’t federate with .meta or whatever they’ll use? Apart from “don’t affiliate with The Zuckerbot”, I’m still not sure what the worry is all about.
Ahh, so if I’m on Site A, I can view and comment on things from Site B, so long as A and B are federated with one another.
There’s a bit more to it, but essentially yes. For example, beehaw.org has defederated from lemmy.world, but we can still view their content. We can interact with their content and reply to their posts, and other instances that they are federated with can see what we do there, but beehaw users can’t see any of it. Basically federation is a one-way street. You can federate with an instance, but they don’t have to federate back.
Apart from “don’t affiliate with The Zuckerbot”, I’m still not sure what the worry is all about.
That’s kind of the motto of the fediverse in general. It’s supposed to be de-centralized and de-corporatized. There are no built-in features for advertising, for example. It’s meant to be a place that is safe from the things that we’re afraid Facebook is trying to do. Overall, it mostly is. They can attract people out of the fediverse and into their garden which they plan to wall off, but they can’t quite shut down the independant instances.
Ahhh, now it makes sense, thank you! So…do we panic because Zillaberg is making a federated Twitter sequel, or…?
Another vote to defederate here.
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What an excellent article. Informative and to the point.
Recommend everyone read it.
