https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Many of us do not trust Facebook and anything it is associated with or swallows up.
EDIT:
"Instagram head Adam Mosseri said "
““Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as @mosseri@threads.net.””
“We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming,” he said.
“If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
To me it’s simple. If Zuck has a part in this, I will find somewhere else to go.
I came here specifically to avoid meta and reddit
Same. If Meta isn’t chased away, I’m leaving the Fediverse. Once I ripped the reddit bandaid off, my loyalty to any one site evaporated. I won’t feel a thing if I need to find somewhere else to go.
If this instance doesn’t defederate from Threads, I’m sure plenty of others will. And you can always host your own and lose very little functionality. That’s the entire point of the fediverse. Tying your view of the fediverse to one single instance is kind of missing the point.
My concern is the embrace, extend, extinguish method that will ruin the Fediverse regardless of the number of instances, as big tech giants are so adept at doing. I don’t have an optimistic outlook here. Meta is here for a reason, and they aren’t going to just go away now that their foot is in the door.
I don’t see how they can accomplish that though. They can’t really bring any value other than lower barrier of entry to users. They’re exposed to other instances and everyone can point out what they’re giving up when they can literally lose nothing by switching to a different instance.
Everyone read one article on ebrace, extend and extinguish and now they’re experts on the subject matter
For all I see is that the biggest threat Threads brings to us is that by federating with them you’re going to receive a shit ton of facebook quality content
Fediverse’s strength is being able to federate AND defederate as a choice, and the hierarchy flattens down from centralised Big Tech networks enough to the point the instances with big community hold power. EEE cannot do much or any damage, and Meta’s foot in the door can be chopped away by instances easily.
The content they will bring is Facebook tier memes and mostly Instagram women audience from what I can see from Threads’ adopters. Since Threads has NSFW and brand/influencer promotion prohibited, its adoption in itself is not just questionable, but in my POV, an experiment by Facebook to gauge the reaction of Fediverse’s current users towards them.
Yup, all that matters is doomscrolling and shitposts, and we can all get our fill of content without any corporate fuckers fucking this shit the fuck up.
Also, Fuck spez and fuck Reddit.
Save some fucking for Ajit Pai while we’re at it.
Gladly, thanks for the reminder.
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Yes. They have destroyed enough internet they shouldn’t allowed to touch this.
hold your horses guys. But seriously, lets not put too much pressure on the Admins, they’re doing a fine job maintaining the servers. I guess we wait how Meta will federate and let the admins take time to decide.
federation with meta will bring nothing but evil into our niche little corner of the net and i am not for it.
Please don’t federate with Meta. You can guarantee they’ll ruin all that is good about the fediverse.
If we don’t defederate from the outset I’m just gonna join another instance that did. I didn’t sign up for Lemmy because I wanted fucking twitter.
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Please defederate from Meta while it is to our advantage.
Don’t federate with Meta, please
If I wanted to be on meta I’d make a meta account
Please don’t federate with the Zucc
It’s starting to look like the capacity for a user to independently defederate their content from specific platforms is in order. Even better would be the capacity to select what specific content is federated where when publishing.
I personally want nothing to do with Meta, but I’d prefer to have the choice rather than having it made for me by the admins.
Agreed. I am already blocking communities I don’t care for all the time but sometimes it would be much easier to be able to just block their entire instance (because the whole instance circles around the same type of content). I won’t be able to find one single instance the federated with just the right others for my taste so let me just filter myself.
Blocking and defederation are not the same, just to note. If you block someone, I’m pretty sure they can still see your stuff. You just can’t see them. Defederation would actually stop them from seeing your stuff.
Defederating doesn’t stop Facebook from seeing your posts. It stops you from seeing theirs. Everyone seems to have this the wrong way around
You are correct. I did get it backwards in a few of my comments. Thanks for the correction.
I don’t think that’s true, because we a world user I can still see things posted on Beehaw. They just can’t see anything I reply with. So, if our instance defederates from threads, we won’t be able to see their posts but they will see ours.
You can’t have an instance that runs on your personal set of preference unless you run your own. Somebody else went to the effort of buying a domain, hosting, handling moderation on their own time, and everything else that comes with running a fediverse instance, so if you sign up to that instance, you get to deal with their rules.
Even if you found an instance which suits your desires–which ultimately amounts to being essentially unmoderated, since you don’t trust an admin to be in charge of moderation–you’d find it getting defederated by other instances because bad stuff happens in unmoderated spaces. What you’re asking for, an instance which can access everything at all times, is fundamentally incompatible with the nature of the fediverse. I’m not being glib, but if that’s what you’re here for, you’re in the wrong place.
That’s not at all what I’m here for but okay.
It sounds like you are, because if you want a place where you alone are in charge of what content gets blocked, what you really mean is a place where nothing gets blocked by the admins, so that it’s all up to you. If you want to be in charge of everything you see, all of that content must be allowed to reach the instance, i.e. it must be unmoderated and federated with everything.
I don’t get how you arrive at that conclusion. All I want is for me myself to not see certainty content I don’t care for. Here’s an example: there’s an nsfw instance that is federated with my instance. I don’t mind that at all. Great content for many people I am sure. But it seems to mostly be communities for straight men (or does into female bodies). I’m a gay man. I really don’t care for tits of any size. So I keep blocking these communities when their posts show up. Would be much easier if I could just block/hide the whole instance from my own feed.
OK, I follow you now, sorry for misunderstanding. When you said “I won’t be able to find one single instance the federated with just the right others for my taste so let me just filter myself,” I took that to mean you wanted to start from scratch, rather than starting from a baseline moderation level you agree with plus your own filtering on top of that. That, I can certainly agree with (especially as a kbin user, where I have that capacity). I imagine it will come to Lemmy as well at some future date.
Yeah all I meant was there won’t be a single instance that tailors exactly to my taste in content, which is fine.
Your choice is in which instance you sign up to, meaning you find somewhere you agree with the admins’ choices. If your views are so unique that no such place exists, you start your own instance.
Well, yeah, that’s how it works now.
I’m looking at an improvement to the current system. Admin views can change, and in this scenario they’re a form of centralized power and responsibility. Delegating this particular power and responsibility to the user would remove the additional burden of moderation and allow the admins to focus on running the instance rather than policing the Fediverse.
Giving users the choice of where their content is federated seems like a happy medium for all parties concerned. The admins don’t have to get political and the users can stay away from the Zuckening if they want to.
This would be a mess to support on a server and I don’t blame anyone not wanting to pay to host that much wasted processing power. You can start a server for under $50. Admins have the power to do what they want on the servers they own. Federation works on a per-server basis. You can block who you don’t want to see. Some even allow you to block entire instances. But federation at the user level is ridiculous on its face and would require ridiculous server power.
As someone who works with large data on a daily basis, no, it’s not.
Gonna point you to my post here.
This is virtually impossible. The amount of processing power to do that would grind any server with more than a handful of people to a halt.
Best case scenario is hoping Lemmy servers has the same capabilities as other ActivityPub servers. You can make it so Threads can see the server but the server can’t see Threads. In those scenarios, even if they reply to your post, you won’t see it.
In any case, if you want to choose who you federate at a user level, create your own server. You can easily federate with who you want at that point. By being on another server, you give the admins some control. That’s an agreement you made when you joined a server controlled by someone else. There is very little stopping you from your own server. It can cost very little up front and after that, effectively just your own efforts to keep it running. You can be the sole user and make it fairly easily.
It’s not a larger server load, because you’re actually publishing less as users defederate their content. The SQL is actually pretty simple if you have a content field for blacklisting that the user selects when publishing. On the federating front end, you simply don’t publish the content to the instance the user defederated from, as marked in the content field. It’s basically one more line in SQL - essentially would be something like:
where content.blacklist != domainin the select statement.
This is actually already in play to some extent over here at kbin, where @Ernest has made one helluva incredible engine - we’ve got domain level filtering for our feeds, and the search capacity is getting pretty cool. Having that same capacity for what we publish would make for an amazing platform.
You’re confusing blocking and defederation. You can already filter what you see as a user.
No, this is talking about what you publish as a user, and choosing where it appears.
That’s not really how the protocol works though. You’re suggesting a major change to ActivityPub itself.
Edit: and it’s a change that isn’t even necessary. It’s the whole reason you can create your own instance.
It’s not a big change - it’s adding a field, a table, and a filtering line to the outgoing SQL select statement that chooses what a domain accesses when it requests the feed. Access level control has been a thing for content management systems for 20 years - this is not a big ask.
But to be honest, as you’re the third person to have this misconception, I’m getting to the point where I’m almost tempted to crack open the kbin code and see if I can do it myself.
Again, you’re talking about changing the ActivityPub protocol. Objects aren’t published the way you think they are. It’s more like batch processing. This simply can’t be done at scale without massive investment.
Edit: ActivityPub is closer to an RSS Feed than it is to sending out what you publish to each server. It makes it’s lsit available to others (who don’t have this filter you’re talking about) and they grab the whole thing. They don’t scan each item and grab it as they go. And again, that scanning is done by them, not the hosting server. The feed is open by default. There is no real authentication and identity at the level you’d require to transform this into an entirely different product (a CMS).
It’s very simple. Facebook/meta bullshit on here and I am moving to -tildes.
Fuck corporations. I hope they all burn and I hope their creators and their born and unborn offspring get cancer and die.
Why Tildes and not just another instance? Tildes is still headed by a single person
If you do move to tildes, would you mind sending me an invite?
I can send you one right now
could I please also get an invite from yourself/anyone else seeing this?
Can you send it to @curiosityLynx or curiosityLynx on Reddit (haven’t deleted it yet because I want to make sure to edit my comments as subreddits go public again)? kbin doesn’t have private messages yet.
Kbin does have private messages. Click on your profile icon/name and you should see “Messages” in the drop down menu.
Oh I have access, I mailed the creator and he sent me one.
I’ll create one and send it your way!
yo if you don’t mind sending me one too that’d be dope
PS Tildes has a nice app now: Surfboard. I kinda hate the website, but using an app is way nicer.
Have lemmy.world admins said anything about this yet at all?
In case Lemmy.world doesn’t defederate, I need an instance recommendation. Preferably something active. Not lemmy.ml and beehaw.org, I’m not going back to those. Anyone got any ideas?
I’m aware of the beehaw drama… But what’s the issue with lemmy.ml?
Yes please block them, I don’t want Meta poisoning Lemmy. If I wanted to see facebook content I would have a facebook account, I don’t.
I can’t even interact on lemmy.world with my mastodon.world account. Is it really worth worrying about Thread accounts being able to interact here?
I have a feeling Thread is never going to bother with ActivityPub anyway. I suspect the threat was only ever a hedge in case Thread wasn’t as wildly successful on launch as it turned out to be.
I think it really depends how big the fediverse becomes. If it becomes popular enough that Meta are missing out on that rich, creamy data mining then you bet they’ll do what ever they can to destroy other instances and the fediverse in general.
"Instagram head Adam Mosseri said "
““Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as @mosseri@threads.net.””
“We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming,” he said.
“If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
I’ve seen the quote but not sure how it applies to what I said.
Just because they add ActivityPub support doesn’t mean it will work with Lemmy. That was why I gave the example of Mastodon.world not working with Lemmy.world.
And that quote was from before the launch which is what spurred the second part of my comment.
Again. You’re replying with a comment/link that does not address any of the points I made.
They provided little in the way of extra elaboration but that link explains a very good reason to be suspicious of corporations and hesitant to add them to any open platform. That directly speaks to your original question of why should you be concerned. I understand that the format of lemmy and threads aren’t entirely compatible and if that’s the case, then there is no need to federate with them as federation can only cause issues and provide no benefit.
That article is FUD. Apple hurt XMPP just as much by never joining it and offering a messaging system within their own ecosystem so folks had no reason to create a second account. XMPP would have been harmed by competition just as much if Google didn’t join it. It was competition that killed it. Not that they had joined.
The article isn’t FUD. FUD is a propaganda tactic. This is a recounting of events from the perspective of an insider. Just because it may give cause to have uncertainty or doubt or hell, even fear, doesn’t mean it is a propaganda piece. And especially knowing how tech giants behave towards any and all competition this is really just a textbook retelling of one of the many events that fall into this same pattern.
I have done a little bit of reading but I’m still not sure what the issue is. Is it that Threads will take over and defacto become the entire Fediverse? Because I think that would happen whether or not Mastoson/Lemmy instances choose to defederate. Is privacy the concern, and if so, wouldn’t it only affect people using Threads?
FB has proven time and again that they don’t care to moderate their spaces, and they increase engagement by presenting the most toxic and angering things to you. Community groups in particular are absolutely hideous on there, full of people angry at the (insert minority group) walking down the street. I don’t want that in my life again, and I don’t want it infecting lemmy. If I did want to engage with that type of content, I’d make an account on Threads.
That said, I’m not out here making demands of our admin and moderators right now. They’re busy just keeping this place running. The threads situation won’t be going away tomorrow, so it can wait a hot minute.
Because this is reminiscent of what happened with XMPP. In the old days you had many closed source protocols for instant messaging. Then XMPP came along and started gaining steam. At that point, major platforms started using it, with everything federated. Someone with Google could talk to someone on Facebook and with someone on myown.sillyserver.net. Everything was going great. But obviously the majority of people went with the easy option to go with Facebook or Google, meaning you still had a federated network on the paper, but with a few actors weighing way more than most.
Obviously at that point, they slowly defederated, preventing their customers from talking to their contacts on other platforms. But most of their contacts where on the same platform, so the cost of migrating was higher. That’s how the federation ended. XMPP still exists, and was actually used by WhatsApp in a non federated way, but it is the shell of itself with not a lot of people using it.
A social network strength is in its number. Accepting Meta into Fediverse creates a very real risk that they will try an embrace and extinguish strategy and in the end you will have most people on Meta and just a niche of people on Lemmy/Mastodon, similar to how it was a few months ago.
The goal of the fediverse is to find the proper balance between having multiple platforms big enough so that moderation and technical management can be done by knowledgeable people, but small enough that they cannot decide willy nilly to defederated. Having Meta in the fediverse would very probably break that balance.
XMPP died because of competition. Everyone is forgetting everyone said Google was losing the chat wars with Apple and that’s why Google repeatedly released new systems. Google left XMPP and that isn’t why XMPP failed. It failed because virtually everyone had either an Apple account or Android account. So they all had a chat account already. They “destroyed” XMPP the same way Blackberry hurt XMPP at the time as well. XMPP would be just as relevant if Google never federated with it.
One concern would be:
- Say Lemmy/kbin grows organically to 1 million users.
- Threads federates, with 100 million users
Do you want these users flooding Lemmy? I don’t want to be biased at the theoretical type of user on Threads, though if the right wingers/trolls/extremists migrate to Threads because they think it’s “more open” then that may be an issue. If it’s full of soccer moms posting pictures of their kids, or karens complaining about everything, that may be an issue.
Multiculturalism is great, I want to hear new ideas, though some areas are breeding grounds for lower-think, it seems. This probably sounds prejudiced or elitist.
I want to talk to the vanguard people who take the risk and are openminded and come to lemmy, not necessarily the “lemmings” who join facebook because they love facebook and don’t want to, or can’t, delve deeper into why facebook is one of the worst forces in media at the moment.
I am not prejudiced (I hope) against “regular people” and “soccer moms”, though think that if 10 million soccer moms came here, the discussions may not be as… interesting, as they are.
Also, I don’t know what lemmy instances will think about downloading masses of data from threads.
I think this will be pretty manageable by finding and using communities that are well-run and have explicit rules and standards of behavior that are enforced. If a community is explicitly meant for serious conversations about, I dunno, music theory, that is enforceable, and if Suburban Subaru Sarah actually wants to join in on that, all the better, but pics of her kid’s soccer game will belong in a different space, just as much as pics of some nerd’s Warcraft raid do too.
Sure. However, you can’t trust meta, so anything that is done I hope has several failbacks and get-out clauses.
Ultimately, there is simply no mechanism for Meta to interfere with a community that it doesn’t federate with. I can definitely see a bit of a split developing between Meta and non-Meta instances, but beyond that, there’s really not much to worry about
This is such a bad analysis of that situation. You are relying on it too much. I’ve pointed it out in other replies to your countless posting of this link with no context.
I donate money to this platform because I want an open and free internet. I want that for anyone who wants to partake. I don’t want extremists, sure - but I think the “soccer moms” you are referring to are really just your average internet consumer. If we don’t agree on that, that’s fine - I’m happy to move to an instance that’s not as restrictive. I think that’s the beauty of the fediverse. I think it’s ironic when you talk about wanting open minded people to join the instance though lol.
I have nothing against “soccer moms”, I just don’t want to see endless photos of their kids, which may be ironic since there’s shitposting on all social networks. Perhaps we’d be able to ignore those communities, however it’ll leak over to other communities.
It seemed to be “fine” when “those” sorts of “regular folk” stuck to facebook for their fix of sharing their lives.
Anyway, this aspect isn’t the main point, I’d say - it’s that one cannot trust facebook, and if they want to federate, it cannot be good for us.
Personally I don’t care about the soccer moms, my main concern is all the problems that come with being a mainstream social media platform. Threads threatens to overwhelm the content being generated with all those problems where your Lemmy feed is just going to represent Instagram etc again. Screw that.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about when using the generic “soccer moms” - mainstream twitter/facebook posts.
I’m probably confusing myself as I have nothing against “normal people”, and want them to discus sthings, and I’m sure there could be a lot of good discussions that could be had with “normal people”, though being drowned by mainstream media posts is the main issue, as you say.
And if that experience ends up being negative, instances can choose to defederate. Many admins just want to see if it will actually be a problem. If admins choose to solve a problem that doesn’t exist yet, let them. But let’s not protest instances and destroy communities over possibly nothing just because the admin is curious to see what happens.
I think it would be easy enough to unsubscribe to the EndlessMoppets community and only subscribe to communities that curate Moppetless posts.
As far as leaking over goes, I never had a problem with EndlessMoppets leaking into any of the subs I did subscribe to over on Reddit.
And for what it’s worth Lemmy is not encrypted so it would be silly to think Meta isn’t already vacuuming up all this content already.
It’s a combination of EEE (Engage, Enhance, Extinguish) tactics, as well as toxicity overload. Meta are notorious for manipulating their viewers. Threads will rapidly devolve into rage bait, since this gives maximum engagement. They will use us to dilute the resultant toxicity. Once it’s established, even de-federating might not be enough. It could generate a locust like influx of toxic new members. The federation doesn’t have the community robustness to absorb that sort of hit right now.
Read up on EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish).
For me it’s mostly because massive corporations love to destroy any possible competition. It has happened repeatedly in history. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I came to lemmy because I hate all those guys and I don’t want one coming in and destroying it. Meta has absolutely no incentive to help the fediverse. He is here for the free code, to fuck with Elon, and destroy some competition. That’s it. Don’t let him.
There are multiple concerns:
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The basic principals of Federation is “killed” as Threads will try and bait people on ONLY using their platform. For example that they wont even show any posts/comments from others but in reverse they spam other posts with their posts and comments.
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There will be a huge increase of users like multiple million users. With it that type of users who want to share literally every opinion. The karen, twitter “Free Speech” type. It will bring much hate to the fediverse.
Personally the fediverses goal is to have smaller instances and not a big boy that wants everything.
And they would try and monetize and advertise in the fediverse.
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I also don’t understand the issue. I’m against meta / twitter / reddit (hence my account here), but how does Threads bring about a degraded experience in any way for lemmy.world users? I feel like if anything this is a great way to get more people comfortable with the concept of the fediverse and push them one step closer to breaking away from the traditional social media companies. So far all I’ve been able to see is “Meta bad, defederate”.
I like your optimism, but Meta is a relentless cancer and FOSS is its enemy. It won’t sit idly by while ideas of ad-free alternatives grow in its users minds. Nothing good can come from Meta’s mingling with non-profit competition.
The only silver lining is how incompetent these corporations have been lately. Fingers crossed, they’ll fuck up whatever nefarious shit they have planned, and the fediverse can carry on in some state when they try to pull the rug - at the very least for those who value its ideals over user count, but hopefully also still as a viable and active alternative.
Here’s an accessible summary of a few historical examples of why people don’t want corporations adopting their open source platforms: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
“…but how does Threads bring about a degraded experience in any way for lemmy.world users?”
Because our feed will be full of the kind of stuff that people will be posting on Threads, complete with whatever boosting algorithm Meta chooses to use on there. That’s not why I’m here. If I wanted a heavily tilted feed of whatever Meta thinks I should see, I’d be there.
Algorithm wouldn’t work well because the whole value to Meta is that it’s curated per user. You can’t do that here. It’d need to be one algorithm for the entire world. So it’ll be very limited at most. Plus they’d have to break the spec to even cause it to happen. At most it’ll be secondary affect in that Thread users upvote it. But even then, if it’s a poor experience, then defederation would be imminent. I’m just against the whole idea of being upset it isn’t happening before we have any remote idea of how it works out.
They will be hovering up your data and in a while they’ll EEE this place to corporate death.
EEE isn’t a verb. It’s a type of attack. Without defining how they possibly could, it’s mostly FUD. And they already can access your data regardless whether they are defederated from your instance or not. Defederation means you don’t see them, not that they don’t see you.
They can already hoover up all your data. Fediverse data is by design very public.
