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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
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.
This is part of the EEE strategy. Why else would it be called Threads?
Thank you! I was so confused.
I keep thinking of the nuclear war movie every time I see that name. That shit’s scarring
german capitalization is hard enough, leave me alone >:(
me fail english unpossible
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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.
24% honestly isn’t bad. I kind of expected it to be less than that given how big some of the instances that haven’t defederated are.
Yeah the active users on the Fedipact servers is pitiful. Goes to show its not a huge group but a noisy one. Why can’t we just give everyone a fair go and if they suck worry about blocking then?
Also gives me a list of instances I’d never heard of probably because the activity is so small.
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.
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.
Care to give a summary on why you think they should be blocked ahead of any bad acting? Yes, there is some concern about Meta attempting EEE, but ultimately they’re a large platform that can bring a lot of users and attention to the Fediverse. There’s nothing preventing large instances from blocking them down the line, and with user level instance blocking coming in 0.19 to Lemmy (not sure if Mastodon et al have something similar), you can block them personally yourself if you wish, rather than having that thrust upon you by your instance admins.
Because Meta has a long track record of being outright an evil corporation(not figuratively, literally).
Meta has already shown its hand multiple times, why would it be different this time?
“evil corporation” is quite the tautology.
Not OP, but some corporations are “less evil” than others, or at the very least less obvious about being evil. “Evil corporation” means they’re extra evil.
Their “test run” was only sending threads posts and not receiving any fediverse posts.
This is them shouting their intent, as far as i’m concerned.
No one has articulated it well. It’s all just “meta bad”. Can’t we just defederate if they pull some crap and be no worse off than we are now?
Essentially because after they did something bad it’s likely too late. But others can explain this in more detail with more knowledge than I have.
Shutup bro
I feel like that one instance not blocking threads should exist, like a common ground where people can interact and maybe convert threads user to leave big corpo and join us
It is gatekeeping, but gatekeeping in the way of “Stop corporate offices in this town” and not “Stop people who we don’t think worthy from getting in”.
As for why blocking threads is good, please google “Facebook Cambridge Analytica”, “Facebook russian accounts” and “Facebook fake republican accounts”. Also: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-knew-radicalized-users-rcna3581
Please don’t treat facebook like a “decent corporation which only committed honest mistakes”. It sold users’ data to corporations, to the Kremlin, allowed users to be specifically targeted by extremist right-wing propaganda and spread disinformation about various international affairs.
Furthermore, there is absolutely zero guarantee that Facebook won’t scan OUR posts for training AIs.
It’s a known bad actor. Allowing Facebook into the fediverse would be as ludicrous as allowing Russians to live and establish bases in the US during the cold war.
Because , we know better than to trust lizard people.
Nailed it. No one can argue with that 🧠
EEE is the reason to defed
This is a great example to explain it to people who are familiar with the topic. But if I tell that to a “random” friend, word for word, they won’t know what I’m talking about :D
Mob mentality?
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 binged enough Zizek to think that I understand Hegel better than Hegel himself.
Slobneedajob Sizzlek
I Gott admit… “Filipino Stickfighting” sounded like it was a real Piece of existing Software 🫣
java is oracle
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.
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 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.
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.
These “wait and see” dingdongs have somehow not learned from decades/centuries of history about how “hearing people out” in situations like this only leads to negative outcomes.
We’ll let in a little Aunt Fash, Liberty Mom, candidate for Alaklabraska school board, as a treat
Different points of view will EnLiGhTeN
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but you prefer echo chambers???
Who wants having their world view challenged?
No offense but lemmy has its own brain rot and echo chambers. Not being exposed to the majority of the public reinforces a lot of this. You’re just exchanging one kind of circlejerk for another.
I agree, but I’ve changed my stance to a wait and see approach. This is what we think will happen, will probably happen, and what I’m interested most of all in, is how Lemmy.world responds once things come to pass. I’ve got agency here to switch to another perfectly good instance that doesn’t federate with Threads, so if Lemmy.world allows social toxicity to prosper…I’ll just leave. The Fediverse rocks.
Watch Meta try to patent the concept of Federation
If anybody can patent it, it’s the W3C who holds it.
Aaron Swartz was working on self hosted social media before ycombinator merged his product with what became reddit.
Facebook is a little too late to the game to get any credit.
Technically Mark was late to the game on social media* but he just fucked the guys over who made FB and took it for himself…
Still too few
Ehm… Shouldn’t Fediverse be… Open?
Meta is a company that is gonna join us in being open and when they get enough users to have their platform running organically they cut us off.
So Threads, which is has 140+ million users and has consistently grown since launch without federation is worried about “getting enough users” from the fediverse, which has less than 10 million?
Fedi users are also about a bajillion times less likely to migrate to a Meta product than the other way around. There was the opportunity to catch some people and help grow the fediverse, but between this and the mastodon HOA (pushes glasses umm excuse me you forgot to put a CW warning on your post about flowers a flower killed my dog when I was five and this is very problematic trauma you’re causing and your alt-text should be at least 3 paragraphs and include a bibliography) it’s likely the fediverse just did what it needed to ensure it stays a niche for like 3 audiences and that more people are stuck with the corpos if they want content that’s not about being a communist or using linux.
Anyway, this is a step for Meta to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Everyone keeps saying how Meta is going to destroy the fedi (don’t worry, we’ll take care of it for them) but no one is saying how. For example, they cut us off? So what? We’re cut off right now.
No one knows the exact way Facebook will try to destroy the fediverse, but I guarantee you they will try.
It challenges the foundation of their entire companies’ profit model. If they lose total control of the social network they will be out of business as quick as you can say Myspace.
Disagree entirely.
For one, Meta has diversified enough that it’s going to be nearly impossible for them to pull a MySpace. They have Insta, Facebook (blue app) and WhatsApp with a billion+ users each. Even Threads on its own is probably sustainable enough to carry them for a decade, and though far, far down the list, they’ve branched into other business like with the Quest. Except maybe pixelfed, there isn’t really even a direct competitor (other than just the vague “social media”) to Meta’s properties.
Second, I don’t think this is any indicator that Meta views the fedi as a threat. Had they, they probably would have just simply tried to buy their way in somewhere, as they did with Instagram and WhatsApp (this is definitely their MO, Facebook is the only true Meta product.) Further, I am not even sure how so many are making the case that the fediverse is somehow inevitable. Projects don’t succeed on pure ideology, and in particular with social media not only do you have to do the technicals right including building a product that users actually want to use, you also have to get the right combination of deliberate community building and sheer luck to get it to stick. Already, the entire point of the fediverse is at odds with how the majority of people want to use social media. With fediverse stuff, you’re expected to curate and deliberately shape your experience. I’ve found more use for blocks and mutes on Lemmy, which is ostensibly the smallest social media site I’ve ever used, and by a large margin. The default these days for most people are Instagram and TikTok - just open the app and watch whatever is served up.
So we’re basically starting at a point that the fediverse is offering a niche product with technical hurdles (which, are very small, but it doesn’t take much) for users to even get on, they’re going to have to spend a decent amount of time to getting to a usable product, find out they joined the wrong instance and rebuild that, and the communities seem to be made up of the gotcha police half of the time. And then there are just the pure numbers. Even with multiple external exogenous events (like reddit had with Digg, for example) from direct analogues to Lemmy and Mastodon, Lemmy is barely growing and Mastodon probably gained about as many users last month as Threads did while I was writing this.
This whole debate on the fediverse is very “For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day in your life, but for me? It was Tuesday.” The fediverse, for its part, couldn’t be a better stooge for Meta at the moment. They can say to regulators “look at us, we’re open” and then watch as the fedi preemptively blocks millions of users from an introduction to the fedi.
Meta may be many times bigger, but that does not mean they are not interested in killing all competition. That is just the megalomaniac mind set.
Not sure a buy-in option exists with the Fediverse.
Meta may not even care if they get partially de-federated. They can still claim they are part of the Fediverse with a simpler start-up. People who were considering trying the Fediverse may think they already have with their Threads account.
lmao you guys are cringe as hell. You really think Facebook is worried about a group that’s a fraction of Reddit’s userbase, which is already a fraction of Facebook’s userbase?
If Threads, which has the biggest userbase of any instance, is allowed to connect with Lemmy, their communities will naturally become the most trafficked (embrace).
Over time, the Lemmy userbase will largely move everything to the communities with the most activity. Facebook could also add its own proprietary features that Lemmy users wouldn’t be able to see or use without the Lemmy devs somehow found ways to enable compatibility (extend).
Then, after a while, Facebook could simply say, “Eh, ActivityPub isn’t worth it,” and turn it off, leaving us without most of the communities we’ve become accustomed to and without most of the users we’ve come to know through those communities (extinguish).
This is known as “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
Embrace a competing product and enable compatibility with the product. This may seem like some sort of goodwill gesture, but it’s not. Companies are in it to make a profit, and any users not using their product is profit lost.
Extend the capabilities of your own product beyond that of your competitor’s product, creating compatibility issues. Some existing users may jump ship to the “better” product because of this, and new users will be pressed to use the “better” product because of the compatibility issues.
Extinguish the competition by disabling compatibility with your competitor’s product after they’ve lost users and stopped growing since you offer a better product with more features.
By using this method, you may successfully kill any potential competitor before they become a problem, nipping its growth in the bud.
You can find more information and examples on the the Wikipedia article about this method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Aren’t they doing this already without federating?
No, “embrace, extend, extinguish” specifically involves some sort of interoperability between a larger organization (Facebook) and a smaller one (Lemmy).
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Considering they already have like 100x the users than the fediverse already…
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Indeed that laugh since 90% of those users are likely bots and the 10% remaining are people that will only overrun this platform with mediocre recycled memes disengaging existing lemmy users.
Unless the benefit would be extremely big, Facebook users are just going to dilute existing lemmy content instead of add to it.
Okay? How would that effect us
I dislike Facebook as much as anyone else, but open is open. Once we start with “open to everyone, except you you and you”, it can’t be called open anymore.
Federated doesn’t mean open.
No, but that was the whole marketing pitch for it. Now everyone is fine with censoring and rules as long as it aligns with their own beliefs.
That’s the point of federation! Choosing who you want in your community.
That’s fair, but then stop using the “federation is like email” propaganda.
People say that? How odd, that seems like a totally different world. I don’t agree with that sentiment! One is a general purpose communications protocol, the other is a community. As with any community, one can pick and choose who they fraternize with.
Won’t someone please think of the multi billion dollar corporations?! Oh the corpomanity!
Corporations aren’t people.
It’s neat how your point fizzles into nothing when we remember this basic tenet of life.
If you want Facebook controlling the fediverse with their overwhelming bulk of users.
How would they control it? If they do anything bad we can just defederate, right?
The problem with that is, if they join, they will have the most active communities. Everyone will naturally want to use those instead of the less active ones in other communities.
So, in that case, defederation may end up harming the userbase. After that, they’d basically have to rebuild the communities that got abandoned for the larger ones on Threads. Some users may even jump ship to Threads to continue using the communities they’ve become accustomed to.
So the question is: defederate and potentially harm your instance, possibly even irreparably, or stay federated and continue allowing Facebook to do what it wants?
We build this entire reddit alternative without interconnectivity with reddit, why couldn’t we do that again if threads decides to do that. People will be familiar with how lemmy works and there will be no ads here, so I don’t completely see a problem. Plus the format of lemmy is completely different from threads right?
We build this entire reddit alternative without interconnectivity with reddit, why couldn’t we do that again if threads decides to do that.
We could, but we’d basically have to start over again. It wouldn’t be quite from scratch, but it’d be pretty close.
Plus the format of lemmy is completely different from threads right?
It depends on how Facebook implements ActivityPub. For comparison, Mastodon and Lemmy both use ActivityPub. Mastodon users can actually search for and comment on Lemmy posts (each Lemmy post and comment appears as a new Mastodon post), but, due to Mastodon having a specific option in ActivityPub turned off (I don’t remember which one), the reverse is not true.
Being open doesn’t mean you let leeches enter your home
But they restore balance to my humors!
Gosh this giant group of White Nationalists wants to come to my house for my birthday, well wow golly gee every opinion is a rich and valuable thing better let them in
Is threads that bad?
Not necessarily threads, but to remain wide open isn’t necessarily the best policy. Or so I assume this to be the point they were making.
Meta is
I agree it’s a stupid company, but I don’t see why we should work against them if they finally decide to so something kinda good.
Read about EEE
Yea but how are they going to extinguish an non-centralized social network?
They enter the Fediverse, use ActivityPub, begin adding some “extensions” to it and suddenly everyone has to play cat and mouse with the new extensions because Meta has 90% of the users. Then, some time later, Meta says they don’t see the need to be federated anymore and pull the plug, disconnecting everyone in the Fediverse from 90% (or more) of the users and from the communities that live on the Meta side.
Just look at what happened with Jabber and Google Talk.
By making it irrelevant
Lmfao doing good?! Facebook spread right wing nationalism/fascism internationally and on purpose. FOH with your bad faith commentary.*
No. This argument is stupid
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Can individual users block instances?
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We don’t need to tolerate nasty megacorporations.
relevant xkcd my friend ;) The fediverse is still open.
Is threads racist? Or just run by a big company?
Run by Facebook.
Not if they disagree with me!
I didn’t know that not wanting to federate with a sociopathic megacorporation that has a terrible precedent with unethical behavior is just a matter of having different opinions.
That’s because you’re biased, argue in bad faith, and want others to agree with your opinions as though they’re facts.
I don’t want people like you deciding what I get to see. I’m sure you feel the same.
It’s not about what you get to see, it’s about who runs the platform.
“WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE BIG MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR COMPANIES RIGHT TO STEAL OUR DATA AND INFILTRATE OUR SPACES TO DESTROY COMPETITION!?”
Bruv, I’m thinking of the users who want to see what they want to see instead of what others want them to see.
STEAL OUR DATA
Bruv, you’re just parroting a talking point that exists to out you as someone who is clueless. It’s been said, many times, that all the data in the fediverse is already openly accessible.
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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What is the share of users that those 41% have?
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Maybe use some critical thinking before acting smug, smart guy. 41% of instances is not 41% of users. Lemmy.world could have 90% of users, and if this 1 instance out of 1000 haven’t blocked threads, the 41% of instances blocking might only host 4% of users.
Wow calm down. I thought he was making a joke about shareholders. You don’t have be a dick about it.
Is this matehmathics
What’s wrong with threads? I’m out of the loop.
Weird middle ground here. I kind of wish that 1 communities FROM threads were blocked, and 2 we had an active dev fund for ad blockers. I’m glad to have threads users come here and add to our communities personally.
Based, actually. People are welcome. Meta is not.
Right cause I think having both having access to normie content and giving normies access to fediverse content is a positive thing if we can balance out the power dynamic with meta. Blocking threads content would just defeat the purpose imo, it would prevent people from leaving threads for the fediverse because they wont be able to get the same content. If threads has it all and fediverse doesn’t, most people are just going to go to/stay at threads. It could backfire.
Maybe if instances could allow meta users to see their posts to pique their interest/gain exposure, but meta users have to join any other instance in order to interact? Kind of like an ad I guess but UI native and unpaid. Though I’m really not sure if the fediverse platform would even support such things in the first place, and if meta couldn’t just fire back with the same thing. It’s just the first thing that comes to mind.
The fediverse’s number one issues right now as I see it are accessibility and content density. I get the concerns people have with EEE but I also struggle not to see this as handling that last E (exterminate) ourselves just to spite meta. I want to join threads just to see what my friends and everyday people are posting, and I’d really like those people to join the fediverse so I can interact with them here. The only things keeping me away from threads however are privacy concerns and supporting meta, so being able to see the same content on a different instance might just be the best of both worlds.
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”
There should be a phone number on the back of your card
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.