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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It’s a clear EEE attack. Do not federate!
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 ¯\(◉‿◉)/¯
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!
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.
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.
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.
Yes you are right. They can. I wasn’t thinking straight.
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?
Level fines and collect them.
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.
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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.
That’s a bummer, hope EU will keep a keen eye on them then. Unfortunately USA and UK have a history of not doing shit.
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.
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 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
Yes, if all the MTA admins refused to SMTP with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo right from the start email would still work. Right now it doesn’t. We don’t want a repeat of that, so let’s defederate from any big corp or anyone who federates with any such.
If you don’t, you’re dead in the long run.
Email doesn’t work? I think you are being a little hyperbolic.
Have you operated your own MTA and tried to get reliable mail delivery to Google, Microsoft or Yahoo? If not, you should try.
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.
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.
Why?
I think we should defederate any corp version of any federated app. Not due to privacy or anything, but because it silos anyone using those services from everyone else. Bluntly, I don’t want people’s B.S. propeganda on the fediverse, and the stupid crap conspiracy farm that Facebook and other places have become.
I’m sure it won’t stop the stupid from reaching us, but it should limit the amount and impact that those users have. Additionally, it will remove a lot of high quality content from those services making them less viable for corps to run and maintain. They will happily farm the fediverse for content to attract users they can monitize… I’m not a fan of handing them more content to steal while they share zero of the profits of that content with either the creators or the communities that handle that data.
I’m not doing their job for them in promoting entertaining and informative posts just so they can make money on it. They want it, they can put forth the effort themselves.
Put another way, given the size of Meta and its userbase, it’s completely infeasible for a typical instance to moderate on their behalf, so defederating due to insufficient moderation makes sense. Just like with Beehaw and sh.itjust.works or whatever. (I take for granted that moderation will suck ass because gestures vaguely at Facebook.)
That’s a good enough reason for me. I also think federating with Meta is a bad idea on principle and out of self-interest, since they will extinguish the fediverse at the first possible opportunity and federating with them gives them the chance to draw in users and later wall them off.
Meh, federated or defederated, threads poses only the first challenge to the fediverse. There will be other players with their own incentives that will join via ActivityPub, add their own custom features incompatible with the broader world, and entice users with slicker interfaces. Fediverse will need to show it can weather it, especially hard with the network effects of the larger corporations’ user bases.
My hope is the pressure will keep open services innovating to better compete and result in a richer experience for everyone.
Best thing that could happen is that reddit would respond with a surprise “we too” will federate with you all, and implement activity pub. Then you have two big actors competing on an open playground. And we grab a drink and enjoy the light show.
Honestly, the reason I left Reddit was the 3rd party api bullshit. If they suddenly federated and I could use Lemmy to subscribe to some of their communities / subs again without needing to be subjected to their bullshit ads and 1st party client bullshit, I’d welcome that.
I mean Tumblr also wants to join the fediverse. They are smaller than Twitter, but still large to have some amount of influence.
That’s an excellent take on the platform.
Competition drives innovation. If something from a walled garden fediverse comes to the broader world as a result, awesome. I mean, if we could federate with Reddit for example, and I could access their subs content but not be subjected to their 1st party app and ads and karma and that’s the stuff on top of their instance, I don’t care what they do on their server.
If anything it may introduce people as a gateway into the fediverse to begin with so when something happens on a corporate instance that pisses them off, they might feel compelled to look into the broader world around them. Not all, but some.
I guess the only big concern most people have here is the Microsoft EEE.
Excellent take.
Drop that trash
How so many people seem to brush this off is beyond me. As far as I’m concerned the purpose of federated, decentralized services is being in charge of who to trust and huge corporations not controlling or monitoring every part of your online activity.
Obviously as soon as Meta starts dealing with ActivityPub and Fediverse, the overwhelming majority of users will flock to their servers. They will be more userfriendly and responsive. In effect they will also hold the overwhelming majority of content and data. Just a matter of time till most of the other instances will become obsolete, due to bandwith regulations or smth similar,
The fediverse will be rebranded as the “Threadiverse”
Basically “embrace, extend, extinguish” in a nutshell.
Obviously as soon as Meta starts dealing with ActivityPub and Fediverse, the overwhelming majority of users will flock to their servers.
Very few people here will go there. They would gets lots of new people, with or without being part of Fedverse. And they would likely only do the Mastodon like part of Fedverse.
As the fediverse grows, there will inevitably be more centralized instances. Every big tech corp may want to start their own instance, similar to how most tech corps provide their own mail services.
There are millions of email service providers, but Gmail and Outlook are synonymous to email for a large amount of people.
Defederating with Meta and Tumblr is like Protonmail blocking every mail from Gmail. You just cripple yourself and make your instance useless.
Every user on threads has something in common. They were stupid enough to join threads.
I’m depriving myself of nothing by defederating that mess.
Threads is a Twitter competitor. Same applies to Mastodon.
Twitter is only useful because companies, celebrities amd politicians embrace it. Nobody cares about ordinary Twitter users. Twitter is a platform for networking with people in the industry and announcing stuff to customers.
Mastodon right now is not an alternative to Twitter, because there is practically nobody important there.
Threads has better chances to overcome this and has already in a few hours pulled more VIPs onto their platform, than Mastodon in multiple years.
This seems right. So what do you propose doing?
I am pro-fediverse, so I guess making Mastodon atleast as easy to use as Threads is a must.
If you look at statistics, Mastodon always gains a massive amount of users, when Twitter does something stupid. Most of these also return back to Twitter, the moment they realize, that Mastodon has no VIPs.
If Threads integrates well with ActivityPub, then people on Mastodon will be more likely to stay, because Threads gives fediverse users access to the VIPs, that they used Twitter for in the first place. This stops people from leaving Mastodon in the short term.
In the long term Mastodon needs to advertise itself to younger people, because nowadays this is the only way for new social media platforms to establish themselves.
That’s how TikTok, SnapChat and Instagram became popular. This would make Mastodon fresh, while Twitter would transform into a graveyard like facebook.
Also having more tech companies, media orgs, cultural orgs, universities and maybe even governments host their instances, would make the federated aspect stronger and the whole fediverse more scalable.
Interesting. In this debate I keep going back and forth, mainly because of the XMPP precedent, but I basically agree with your pragmatic priors.
Your last point is so true. Actually I can’t help feeling a bit of schadenfreude about all those well-meaning organizations and VIPs and whole governments that went all-in on proprietary platforms and now find themselves on super uncool sinking ships or controversy-laden fiascos. I mean, what was some regional government or university doing on Twitter in the first place?! Same thing for Whatsapp literally replacing phone numbers in many countries. I mean, this is a single private company FFS, you have no control over anything, yet apparently most people and organizations still cannot see the problem - incredible. This is why we always need protocols and standards. It was obvious all along. Anyway, forgive the rant, I agree with your take.
What XMPP precident? XMPP is great and I use it everyday. Is that what you’re talking about?
I think one of the biggest things we can do is identify ways to fight bots. One thing has become clear to me, and that’s that Reddit and Twitter are stuffed to the gills with bots and professional trolls. I haven’t seen a small fraction of the rage engagement here that I did on Reddit, and I’m guessing that the reason alt-right and other extremist messages echo so hard on these platforms is that they really drive rage engagement. These platforms eat it up, because any engagement is good engagement. I worry that Threads will represent an absolute Tsunami of bot-driven garbage and ragebait being broadcast to federated servers.
FSVO VIP.
Come on what is this elitism, almost everyone has an Instagram, it’s not that huge of a leap to just press the button that says threats, it’s not a sign of stupidity.
Seriously there is some heavy gatekeeping and elitism going around whenever there is a conversation around META
You make it sound like listening to the type of person who uses Threads is useful. Weird.
I feel like the EEE attack is inevitable at this point.
Why else would they even be willing to federate?
They saw the threat that decentralized non-profit social media is and want to kill it before it has a chance.
All Lemmy servers and especially the largest ones need to defederate from it immediately.
They’re “willing to federate” as an end-run around certain antitrust laws in the EU. By supporting ActivityPub, Meta has plausible deniability in claiming they’re not a monopoly, despite being a de-facto monopoly being their final goal.
I think defederating is the only way forward, Facebook will take over otherwise even if they do it slowly.
No offense but I think the website becomes useless if it’s defederated.
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.
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?
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.
Yeap. It doesn’t to go mainstream; it’s already successful.
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.
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 run my own instance and am defederating immediately (whenever they start federating). I did also join the pact.
I’ll evaluate their impact a month or so in and decide whether or not to refederate.I acknowledge there’s potential for a positive impact here, so I will give them a chance.
In my opinion, nothing. If Meta is able to effectively take over Fediverse as people are claiming, then the Fediverse was never destined to survive to begin with. On to the next thing. This is the first real test of the resilience of this type of “decentralized social network”, and if it ends up going to shit, it would have eventually anyway.
I disagree with this. You’re saying we should watch Meta invade and profit off the fediverse and do nothing? Just because it’s an open standard doesn’t mean we should watch and let it happen, defederating is retaliation. The fediverse isn’t going to succeed by people doing nothing and watching others ruin it.
We’ve seen this happen. Many times. If the fediverse admins are going to repeat the mistakes of other standards then it’s going to slowly get worse until people do another standard and do it all over again.
What I’m saying is that if there’s always this constant corporate threat, if there’s the functional possibility of it happening, then it will eventually happen. If not Meta, then Musk, or god forbid Trump. Having to constantly “defend” against a mega instance does not seem like a sustainable future for the platform. That said I don’t think this is even an issue. There will always be instances that fundamentally don’t and won’t federate with Threads and other potential big players, so just go there. That’s kinda the point of this whole thing isn’t it? Activitypub and Lemmy/Mastodon won’t go away just because most people are somewhere else.
What can we do as user though? Other than whining which make instance admins and moderators job more difficult, we can only do very few things to stop meta. Fediverse is free, it is better for us users quietly migrate away from instance that don’t align with our value (in both ways) than harrasing instance admins. At worst it will make admins rage-quit then all of sudden your (or our) instance is gone like that mastodon.online…
I didn’t say we should harass admins, I’m saying it’s up to us as a community to either move to an instance that defederates or if you know what you’re doing, stay on an instance that does federate and don’t add content to Threads. Lurking is okay, but posting there means you’re adding value to them and taking away from local communities and slowly rendering other instances irrelevant.
It bothers me that after leaving for-profit social media, a lot of people here are totally fine going straight back to them. Have we really learned nothing?
I didn’t say we should harass admins, I’m saying it’s up to us as a community to either move to an instance that defederates or if you know what you’re doing, stay on an instance that does federate and don’t add content to Threads.
I don’t imply that it is you, but the harrassment did happened.
It bothers me that after leaving for-profit social media, a lot of people here are totally fine going straight back to them. Have we really learned nothing?
I think it is different, when we use their services on their platform, they are our lords. They can do anything to our content and identity there with little to no retaliation potential. When we interact with them using fediverse, we can hold our ground and control what data we cede to them to interact with their users.
Nobody1 ever learns. Anything. Ever. Especially not from past mistakes.
1 Where those who do are so small in number as to basically be a quantum fluctuation’s worth
