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”.
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.
Even if there were no bots and it was only “real” content from Threads … is that the sort of content we want to have Lemmy flooded with?
This is dumb gatekeeping nonsense. It’s the exact same asshole bullshit behaviour we saw on Reddit when people complained about it getting popular.
Reddit is far better for reaching a wide audience then it was when it was just a bunch of 20 something nerds in their echo chamber.
they arent wrong
Yeah they are.
how do you know
Mr @zuck is there any chance of you reading my messages about my request for 2M$ man i have been trying every day to contact you and waiting for your response since last 5 months . I have told you why i am asking you for 2M$ i dont know if you ever read my messages but in short you are the only who can make it happen and if there is someone who can give me 2M$ its only you so please read my messages and please make it happen for us and change our lives I am waiting for you since last 5 months .
Looks like the exact same bullshit as facebook and twitter. There might be better examples of good or bad posting though since Zuckerzuck’s posts are especially spammed out, since splammy people think they’re especially good for visibility.
yeah, but I didn’t want more brain damage sifting through accounts over there lol. but still, when you have a 100 million mau, there are going to be a ton of bots, especially when there are next to no moderators.
I’ve barely ever used threads, in a large part because they don’t have a fully functional website and require use of an app. So I have no idea… I assume there’s some quality content but I agree that it must be flooded with BS too. I’d be interested in seeing what a Lemmy instance connected to threads looks like. I assume it would wreck browsing ‘New’.
I’ve used threads since it was released out of curiosity, and it’s so far got some of the best moderation I’ve ever seen.
No joke, it seems like they are trying their best to make it as friendly and wholesome as possible.
So many women and minorities uplifting and helping each other, it was honestly quite shocking.
On twitter, I sometimes spend a couple hours just reporting hateful people, and only one or two reports ever gets acted on, everyone else seems to get a pass to hate.
But on Threads, I’ve yet to even need to report a single post, it’s kinda eerie.
I don’t really have much faith in the developers myself. Considering all the shenanigans they get upto.
I do however have real faith in the main developer of lemmy, considering his ideology, which is incompatible with bigtech values.
you can even see it from his own profile.
His ideology is why I don’t have any faith in him. Hes authotarian left wing. Generally I find tankies not to be the nicest of people and tend to ignore alot of historical facts. Like the Khmer Rouge! I wonder what happened in Cambodia at some point in history 🤔🤔🤔 The way they operated there modus operandi is almost like a certain other points in history
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.
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.
Go look for yourself instead of being condescending.
Welcome to Lemmy!
It’s like Reddit with the provocative takes and hyperbole, but even more extreme somehow!
This place is hilarious.
Excuse me sir, i cant be more agree with you
me too ^_^
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.
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.
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
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.
How can they possibly steal any data other than what you publicly shared on the internet?
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.
Meta can collect every scrap of Lemmy right now
Edit: downvote for what? My comment is true
Everything is public on fedi (if we’re talking about communities alike), so any bot can and is already scrapping everything through regular HTTP. You must be extremely ignorant to think otherwise.
I’m not too worried about Threads joining the metaverse. What Mark Zuckerberg has failed to realise is just how barebones his Twitter clone is.
Mastodon has support for trending topics and hashtags. Threads doesn’t. Lacking such an absolutely basic feature that any microblogging platform would otherwise support is why Threads dropped from 500M active users to just a fraction of it.
I joined it near launch, made a few posts and then stopped. There is nothing worthwhile on Threads and I don’t think leeching on to the fediverse.
Also, I can kinda understand why you all rushed to defederate from Gab when they tried to jump on the federation bandwagon, but not Meta.
Zuckerberg doesn’t need us to overtake X. He needs to actually make a functional social media app first, then put more resources into moderating it.
X is still on top despite Elon Musk’s stewardship because his competitors are either too small (most federated instances), require too big of a technical hurdle for the average Joe to use (the fediverse in general), or are downright incompetent (Threads.)
This take is riddled with naivety.
Not only will Meta read, train AI on, aggregate and datamine, and correlate this data with your real identity, but when Meta announces that “the easiest way to be on the fediverse is to just use Threads” then all the people who avoided Mastodon because it was “too complicated” to sign up, all the people who are basically already signed up because they scroll Insta all day, will go with Threads instead of spreading the load out.
As smaller instances start to drop off under the load, under the lack of interest as threads grows and they shrink, merely mirroring the traffic of a centralized corporate entity, users start to flock to threads for its reliability and speed.
Then Meta pulls the plug, since “no one really used this ActivityPub thing anyway, it was too technical”.
Threads isn’t about beating “X” (lol X is in a death spiral, it’s only a matter of time), it’s about ensuring the Fediverse never rises up.
See what happened with Google Talk and XMPP.
Not only will Meta read, train AI on, aggregate and datamine, and correlate this data with your real identity
They undoubtedly do this already. There’s nothing stopping them from setting up an instance that looks like a personal one and pulling all the data the Fediverse has to offer.
I’m worried because it’s only gonna be a matter of time before fakebook is able to play around enough to get threads to be functional enough for the average user. They may be evil, but they aren’t dumb.
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
I remember what the standardising committee did to XMPP: users wanted to share photos, send files, and make audio/video calls; XMPP said “we’re not going to standardize that, but each application can use its own extensions”… then it all went to hell.
XMPP is still alive and well, is it not?
You don’t get how big it was in 2007. I used ICQ and felt some sort of peer pressure (and progress pressure) to switch to XMPP. You could chat in FB via XMPP, in VK via XMPP, a lot of services would just give you an XMPP account because why not. It was like RSS.
Will the Mastodon and Lemmy instances we have today cease to exist because of Threads federating?
I’m just genuinely curious how we could be worse off than before.
From a previous comment of mine:
To be clear, I want it to be users deciding on Lemmy too. Also, people already here moving to threads wouldn’t be the problem, we’re small in comparison to them. It would be a few things:
- They would bring in a huge party of users that would take it over and overwhelm the current users. It would be like a cruise ship of tourists taking over a small town and breaking everything for the current residents.
- They could post to Lemmy, but we can’t really post to Mastodon. They’re going to send ads our way disguised as content, guaranteed.
- If they can manipulate the users from Mastodon, it’s going to get out of hand fast. They have teams of devs and psych engineering to accomplish that.
- This is volunteer ran, do we have enough energy to fight Meta when they try to enforce something?
- Can they manipulate Activity Pub software because we’re a small team of devs? If they can, they will.
- One person mentioned them having instance owners sign NDAs. What’s up with that?
It doesn’t benefit them to send adds disguised because they are paid to provide ad impressions which they wouldn’t have data for. It’s just an annoying business model not a conspiracy to brainwash you.
Nah, companies did it on reddit all the time, it’s a thing.
That’s why you need Nord VPN so you can play raid shadow legends safely…
The thing is they have so much less control if they do that, I’m fed up of places with adverts where comments are turned off or heavily moderate - if their post comes here they can’t do any of that, I say we let them come, we let them come and then we smash them
They may be overwhelmed by visitors from Threads and then Meta pulls out and they’ll all leave.
People who would register on normal instances or threads would only use Threads because of being lazy and then be lazy after Meta pulls out.
If they become overwhelming, admins can defed same as anywhere else. But whats the argument for doing so preemptively?
I’m fairly new to the fediverse, but I see it this way. If Threads integrates with the Fediverse then users will become accustomed to the content from Threads, which could cause more friction in the future if there’s a movement to defederate from Threads. I think it would just be easier to avoid all that in the first place. I also feel like if anyone really wants to see Threads content they could make an account there, and then everyone gets what they want. Then there’s all the downsides others are theorizing could happen, but they can’t be comfirmed until Threads actually joins the Fediverse.
People who would register on normal instances or threads would only use Threads because of being lazy and then be lazy after Meta pulls out.
Isn’t this already the case? I find it unlikely for someone to find Lemmy without having developed a dislike for platforms owned by big corpos.
… And then they can use it through Threads, and over time forget something and move to Threads, and then oops. Such things happen. Humans are not principle-driven nor should they be.
I think you misunderstood me. I’m saying that whenever someone finds out about Lemmy, it’s because they’ve already sworn off Facebook, Reddit and other big platforms.
Do you think such a person will go back to a Facebook-owned platform just because it happens to federate?
XMPP was dead on arrival.
Could threads generate so much data that it costs to much to keep an instance/server running?
In my opinion all big player are just federating to destroy the fediverse or take it over. Why else would they be here? There is just no need for them to be here exept to kill competition before it gets to big.
Better yet, let them enjoy the full connectivity for a month. Once they’ve enjoyed all the awesome content and got used to it - defederate.
“Everyone everywhere should federate.”
“Not like that!”
We don’t federate with nazi instances either.
Threads has massive homophobic and racist accounts like LibsOnTikTok and MomsForLiberty. We shouldn’t federate with an instance that can’t even take care of banning that.
Well, I said before I’ll leave any servers that federate with Meta, and it’s looking like that time.
Too bad people on mastodon don’t have the ability to block an instance they find objectionable for themselves-- oh wait.
Not sure about Lemmy, but we can do this on mastodon. I don’t need someone else deciding for me.
Tldr? Couldn’t disagree more
I agree, I don’t want a blanket ban on Threads. I know Meta is a horrible company, but we shouldn’t decide in advance.
Honestly, I’d be very happy to be able to follow people on Threads through my privacy-respecting Mastodon/Lemmy app. Because, let’s be serious: we’re just a bunch of nerds here. If I want to follow famous people or companies, I’m going to find them on Meta’s platforms, not here.
ActivityPub lets me follow those accounts without using Meta’s apps, which are famously riddled with ads, trackers and whatnot.
why do you want to follow famous people and companies
Why not? I want to keep up to date with their announcements and products. Famous people could be writers, journalists, whatever.
Following famous people and companies is what 99% of users of “normal” social media do.
you can join threads
I don’t want to use Meta’s apps, because they’re a privacy nightmare. Full of trackers
It might take time but why not naturally wait for these famous people to expand their network and consider being on lemmy/mastodon? Without having to interact with Threads at all? I feel it would just be a matter of time, and we can adjust on our own terms instead of having to let Threads in.
Famous people need regulars to follow them. Get more people like you and me and celebrities will follow.
lemmy very recently got this feature.
Yeah, another fail from the design team.
Kinda stupid how much we value having power taken away from us and given to random people on the internet.
thats what big companies do
There’s a list of people that have agreed to block it at https://fedipact.online/
Oh jeez how do I turn off all the moving stuff
That site is an assault on my eyes.
Graphic design is my passion.
The design convinced me to give meta a chance.
Let users decide because we’re fucking adults.
Great thing about the fediverse
People get to decide what they want from their platform
Surely you’re aware of the embrace, extend, extinguish corporate strategy.
People only get to decide what they want from their platform until facebook starts extending the spec. Then your client will become incompatible with some posts, and so on and so forth.
In summary, it’s a threat to the platform itself.
Exactly, I hereby decide that I would like to ignore corporate efforts to undermine this burgeoning new platform. I furthermore reserve the right to complain about the loss of said platform in future years by claiming that it’s everyone elses fault for allowing corporate encroachment.
Then go join threads.net? Nobody’s stopping you from doing that. That would put you on a server friendly to your beliefs.
Server admins also have opinions, and are not required to take a democratic vote and each individual user’s choice into account. They can decide for themselves, and they will, for good or ill. If you don’t like where it ends up, your user decision should be to fuck off to threads.
I don’t want to join a proprietary service, but I want to be able to communicate with people who chose to join it.
Facebook accounts are free, that’s all ya need man
They are not free because they deprive you of your privacy.
Interesting. Then why would we want lemmy drowning in all that?
Because if the content is federated, then you can access it without sacrificing your privacy.
I don’t think that’s what they’re saying.
They’re saying that some users and admins might choose to wait and see
“Yes, Jeffrey has, in the past, killed and eaten gay men. But we should wait and see. It’s impolite not to invite him to the party!”
I don’t want to use their platform, but I get why some people might choose to stay federated so that there is incentive to pull people to mastodon and educate people about the issues
There’s enough nuance there that I’m not dead set on either side, and I think we still have the chance to defederate later if there’s an increase in spam and harmful content / disinformation.
“Jeffrey doesn’t always eat people. Just sometimes. We should totally go clubbing with him and spurn him later if he eats one of us.”
You have the full right to decide, you can switch servers to one that chooses to, or open multiple accounts. That’s your choice. This isn’t Nostr, in the Fediverse instance blocking is normal and it happens without your input, but you know what does happen with your input? Registering your account on a server that fits your needs best, or as close as possible.
This is why I don’t understand all the hysteria about this.
If I don’t want to see Threads or I don’t want Threads to see me, I can go to a Threads account and click “block threads.net”.
But obviously that’s too complicated and it’s easier to just whinge to your instance admin about how Threads federation will be the death of us all. 🙄
If there was a bot that just flooded All with far right talking points, do you think admins ought to block that or leave it to the users?
What if it was far right mixed in with cat memes?
What if it started more slowly like a few posts an hour and then ramped up over 6 months to be 1000s of posts per hour?
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.
Imagine thinking Myanmar is facebooks fault. Wow.
Read up rookie
https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in-myanmars-attacks-on-minorities/
I don’t know what version of reality you live in but i hope these articles are illuminating
I can’t imagine why you are getting push back. I can tell you are very passionate in your position and are on the right side of a complicated issue. The only reason I can think of is your idea hasn’t become mainstream yet and people hate it when they don’t know they should be upset.
Either way I have no skin in it and I agree that meta is garbage. Thank you for be passionate about something in this dispassionate world.
I’d imagine is because Myanmars situation is way more complicated than Facebook “undoubtedly caused a genocide”.
Seems like it’s getting trivialized to shit on Facebook
Facebook deserves every ounce of shit it has coming to them.
True.
But do you believe the actual people commiting the genocide and manipulating Facebook shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions?
:3
🙄 I guess the years of violence well before hand we their fault too. Imagine trying to tie years off violence and genocide to Facebook.
It’ll always be Burna to me.
It will always be … a name that doesn’t exist and has never existed?
(Hint: BURMA. It’s hard to sound smart when you can’t even get a single fucking name right! Especially the name that “it will always be” for you. Holy fucking shit!)
You wrote all that over an obvious typo? 🤣🤣🤣🤣
An “obvious” typo you missed when you wrote it. When you read it back after posting. In a post where you were putting on airs of being smarter than everybody.
I fucking love it when that happens and love to rub it in.
That one is actually public record, with
-
Facebook using their influence to set up in the country in a way that made it the dominant form of internet access for the country, enough that a large number of people considered Facebook=internet
-
Facebook getting multiple reputable warnings about what was happening on the platform, what their advertising policies and algorithms were encouraging, and they chose to not act on them and instead continued to profit from it
-
They finally did act after a whole lot of harm was done
-
Because it was totally and we have the receipts? Imagine being that ignorant of world events.
This. Imagine begging daddy admin to protect you from mean Meta.
Imagine zucking on Marks schlong.
You understand that no matter how much you kneel down to service Meta, Zuck the Fuck won’t be trickling anything down on you that isn’t a bodily fluid, right?
And hey, I’m not going to kink-shame. Just pointing out that if that isn’t your specific kink, you might want to wake up to there being zero dollars trickling down to you.
What a meaningless, worthless comment. Letting Threads federate with the rest of the Fediverse doesn’t give Zuckerberg power over us (unless you’d care to explain how it does) - rather, it just gives its users and our users the ability to interacted. Why are you so interested in building walls?
I swear, I’m seeing the western equivalent of wumaos servicing Meta here. Only at least the wumaos got paid; it made sense. These idiots are doing the labour for free!
Why do you hate user choice so much?
Are we not discussing the choice to defederate? As in most choices, some options are better than others. Sometimes it isn’t obvious what the best option is. People discuss and share ideas to make their decision.
We as a community are faced with the choice of whether or not to support threads[.]net. We can think about it individually, or on an instance-by-instance basis - but we can also discuss it collectively. That’s whats happening here.
Defederation is not user choice, it’s decided by the admin of an entire instance.
What a lame take.
Go to their server if you want to or one that don’t defederate, or spin one up yourself, the choice is still yours.
I don’t want meta to benefit from my server, hosting their biased crap, how about that for a user choice.
It’s your freedom as an admin to block them, but indeed the cost is the freedom of your users to communicate with people on Threads. As a user I would prefer an instance that doesn’t restrict my communications in that way.
Freedom isn’t letting everything be or letting anyone do anything. That’s anarchy.
When meta kills off 99% of Lemmy servers because they can, where’s your “freedom”?
Freedom isn’t letting everything be or letting anyone do anything.
I only talked about communicating with Threads users not “anything”.
When meta kills off 99% of Lemmy servers
Why should Meta be able to do this?
@mypasswordis1234 I mean, what is the point in defederating while being in a Lemmy instance? You cannot interact with microblog while using #Lemmy. The only thing that comes to my mind is that threads users will not be able to comment on a lemmy post or comment, but let’s be honest, the way communities will probably federate to #threads (the same way it is today with mastodon*) is not good, thus reducing the amount of attraction a lemmy post can get over there.
- For some weird reason in the implementation of the AP protocol, lemmy posts are seems as just a link on mastodon, the replies are complete though. If someone understand this better and wants to explain, feel free to do it.
For some weird reason in the implementation of the AP protocol, lemmy posts are seems as just a link on mastodon, the replies are complete though.
ActivityPub allows two post formats, Notes and Articles. Articles support titles and therefore posts on Lemmy and threads on /kbin use them, while notes do not and are therefore used for microblogging and commenting. Currently Mastodon’s article federation only goes so far as linking the post for content, and to be honest I’m doubtful whether Threads will federate Articles at all given their carefulness with federation.
