Fediverse
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
We need to think this through from the standpoint of an instance admin who is trying to figure out how to use Threads to make their instance grow. That’s really the only motivation I can think of to federate with Threads. Otherwise it’s just all downside. As a corporate social media entity, they are entirely opposed to everything Lemmy stands for philosophically, and their scale is a massive threat to the culture and operations of the much smaller fediverse. Why would anyone ever want to federate with them? Because they see it as an opportunity. To ride the dragon, thinking it can be controlled. This is madness. Choice 4 all the way and if it becomes necessary, 5.
The beauty of the Fediverse is you do not need to make everyone else agree with you. It is important that mods know what you want; what you think other people should want is irrelevant.
No, you don’t need to go around making other people agree with you, on the fediverse or anywhere, really.
But if you are going to enter into a mutual risk/benefit relationship with another party, it does help to understand what their motivations are, so you can figure out if they’re going to line up with your own, or lead to conflict.
My post is about trying to understand those parties’ motivations. Not make everyone agree with me.
They already got millions of users. Depending how they'll implement federation, the sudden influx of millions of unmoderated users into the fediverse might wreak havoc to small instances. So personally, I prefer no. 3, defederate (wait and see).
I'm starting to dislike the concept of ActivityPub. It gives power to the admins instead of to the users. Users should be able to decide what servers they connect to and what content they see. I hope another protocol like Nostr becomes more popular.
It gives this power to anyone willing to shell out a fiver a month.
...and the know how to set up and maintain a server, which is beyond most
There are hosting companies that offer managed mastodon instances. I assume they might offer managed lemmy instances as well in the future.
When the barrier to entry is technical in nature you get a selection of the competent in that space as your representation. It's not perfect, but it beats zuck, musk and Huffman.
Each individual user, even though others disagree with them?
The only way to organise it so that all users get what they want is to make it easy to move instances. By and large, it is.
So why is it important to not federate (or block) with Thread? Asking seriously. I read the article and while those are valid and real concerns. What is the net gain of that action? How does it help the fediverse? I cant see any way that it helps and lots of ways it hurts. At this point it seems like a lot of what ifs.
Edit:
If you need the reasons why to block Threads (meta) I think the answers below explain it better than most!
From what I understand, they're likely trying to kill the fediverse by making it irrelevant (embrace, extend, extinguish) seeing how it's finally starting to grow, since they can't just buy it up this time like they've always done to competitors.
Even aside from that though, their algorithms designed to retain user attention by any means necessary are definitely going to seep into and poison the fediverse, at least indirectly, if they're federated.
Not to mention they could easily run ads as normal posts and boost them artificially; they are an ad company after all. Wouldn't put it past them.
Not federating with them means we don't have to deal with all that, and the fediverse can just continue to grow naturally as it's been doing.
Federating on the other hand means a very real risk of permanently halting the fediverse's growth in favour of corporations', like Google did to XMPP
Once federated, an instance get a ton of data about users and their actions. I am not willing to provide that to facebook.
Defederating is a one-way transaction. Any instance that defederates from Threads will only stop themselves from receiving data from it, but Threads will still be able to pull data directly from any and all instances.
@ninekeysdown @jocanib i would say its because its meta trying to get a foothold on the fediverse and possibly take people away from here. people might just use threads instead of mastodon or lemmy since they can get the content on threads. my take
Everyone is talking about defederating preemptively because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it's much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can't just copy Twitter - it has to be "Twitter, but better". So, doing what any exec does, he looks for buzzwords and trends to make his new product more exciting. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta's standpoint, they don't need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I'm sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
4 is honestly my preference. I don’t see the need to defederate from instances that federate with Threads. But I do want to see a list of instances that federate with Threads so I can personally never comment or post there. I don’t like the idea of comments and posts I make being used to generate ad revenue for Facebook.
100%. It boggles my mind that we’re even considering this.
I frankly prefer options 4-5. There’s no evidence that Facebook will play nice and a lot of historical evidence that they won’t. I want to be on an instance willing to take the nuclear option if it comes to it.
- Make your own instance, defederate from everyone, make 20 accounts, disable account registration, post from 2 or 3 accounts, upvote from the rest and make conversations.
/j on the 5... cuz it's a bit extreme.
Choice 2. 5 is ridiculous and more harmful to the fediverse than the worst case of EEE.
Only real threats of Threads federation are EEE and server overload. Not the people from there or privacy. If someone wants to see some content you don't want to see, like some opinion you don't like, they should be able to see it. I don't understand why there would be such list, it would be pure censorship and waste of time. I have heard Threads has a pretty good moderation, so that solves this problem anyway.
I don't get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
I don’t understand why there would be such list, it would be pure censorship and waste of time.
A major point of the Fediverse is that you can choose instances based on their moderation policies. If you want fash crawling your timeline, join an instance which allows fash to crawl your timeline.
I don't get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
Site A hosts communities that serve vulnerable people. They see Meta as a threat to those vulnerable communities, as they are not well moderated, and have no issues with hate speech and harassment, so they defederate.
Site B federates with both Site A and Meta. They act as a pass-through for content from Site A to reach Threads.
Bad actors on Threads see content from vulnerable people on Site A and engage with it. People from Site A cannot see the bad actors on Threads doing this, but people on Site B do, and bad actors there get alerted to an opportunity to be proper shit stains. Now, vulnerable people on Site A get targeted by this induced harassment coming from Site B.
What does Site A do?
They defederate from Site B.
The question is just about whether they wait until the harm has been done or not.
I hate to say it but we already need a better Twitter and Reddit alternative than what the fediverse has to offer, then. Each time a big company comes in, the communities will get thrown into disarray, eat eachother, and generally make the original 'vision' of the fediverse smaller and smaller. People will use what is easy, not what is best for their interests (at least for the vast majority). The solution is still open source, community managed and driven content, but it doesn't look like the fediverse is a long-term answer.
From what I gather, EEE only works if:
- Fediverse users mass exodus to Threads
- Meta extends ActivityPub Standard so much that other FOSS projects couldn't keep up.
I feel like defederating would not solve 1. If 2 happens, the fediverse would just defederate anyway.
(Ofc we have to think about the privacy risks of federations etc.