Meta threads will open federation to the fediverse soon, and while this is mainly to mastodon it will still affect lemmy. They are acting like they won’t be evil, but let’s be real this is Facebook when have they ever done that.
This article which has been trending lately explains some of the issues. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This comment here is a simple analogy if you can’t be bothered reading the article. https://lemmy.ca/comment/5702922
@lodion@aussie.zone
Meta is a cancer, there is no benefit to the company being given any access to this instance.
Personally I think this is ridiculous.
First, there’s the simple fact that Lemmy’s interaction with Threads will likely be the same relatively rare/limited interaction we currently have with Mastodon. People might show up to comment from time to time, and we’ll be able to @mention their users. But that’s about it. It’s not a serious issue for Lemmy instances to be concerned about.
But second, I think pre-emptive defederation here, regardless of whether we’re talking about Lemmy or Mastodon instances, is ridiculous. If they start doing bad things, it is trivial to defederate at that time. If they don’t, we’re much better off letting them participate and benefit from the increased number and variety of users with whom we can interact thanks to their participation in the fediverse.
Don’t fall for FUD when there’s an opportunity knocking.
If they start doing bad things
Meta/Facebook have been doing bad things for 20 years now.
“I don’t know why they ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.” - Zuckerberg
If they start doing bad things
They knowingly house hate groups. They’ve been doing bad things since the start…
They will do bad things. They have a proven track record. So fear? Sure. No uncertainty or doubt though.
I agree, we cannot pass up the opportunity to get more interaction, especially when there is such little harm to us. At the end of the day we can choose to defederate with threads at any time, unless you have an account on their instance they shouldn’t be able to track you, at least without exploiting a vulnerability in Lemmy or Mastodon.
Edit: I’ve had a bit of a think and changed my mind see comment in reply to the reply to this comment
More interaction is not the same as good interaction.
especially when there is such little harm to us
What’s your motivation to be a Lemmy user? What keeps you here?
I am very afraid of what a big American company can do to this community. They see everything as a stepping stone to money.
I’ve had a bit more of a think about it and read that article about XMPP again, and I’ve had a change of mind.
Earlier I was thinking about the possibility of becoming mainstream, however, not being mainstream is probably what makes Lemmy so great. And would threads users even discover us or would they just try to suck the life out of Mastodon by talking over everyone? How would threads rank posts from Mastodon vs posts on threads?
Furthermore, if we became mainstream we might attract the attention of government which might try to regulate us. This could make admins and mods legally responsible for the discourse in their communities which could be discouraging for instances like ours. Remember, while email isn’t regulated politicians don’t understand computers beyond basic usage, so this is probably the same thing as Facebook to them. Even if we didn’t become mainstream, mods and admins would just be slaves to Meta focussed on dealing with their large variety of users rather than trying to grow our own communities.
Another question I’ve considered is do we even need their users? My answer to that is no. Another thing that makes Lemmy Lemmy and even more so Aussie Zone is the quality of the users. Not just anyone will join, we get people who are more passionate about the bigger picture, people who demand something better, people who aren’t afraid to try something new. Lemmy users are visionaries which is why we have such passionate arguments and why there is such a large bias towards progressive politics.
So yeah, I think we should tell Meta they’re dreamin’ and send em back to the pavilion. Or in other words: Fuck off Meta!
It’s interesting how attractive the thought of becoming mainstream is. Bigger = better.
mods and admins would just be slaves to Meta focussed on dealing with their large variety of users rather than trying to grow our own communities.
I wonder if mods & admins would just be overwhelmed, or if Meta would find a way of using their effort and hours to their advantage? ie use them as a free modding force for their product (indirectly). Labour for your Lemmy instance would become labour for Meta.
I’m surprised by your full turnaround in opinion. Some of your earlier thoughts are valid: they probably won’t be able to track you any more than they currently can (through read-only Lemmy interaction) and more interaction does have its benefits.
I guess perhaps defederating them now vs later might come down to whether or not you see Meta as a person or a company. If a new person joins/federates then you generally don’t want to pre-judge them, even if they’ve had a bad history you hope they can stick to the rules and participate well. Alas Meta isn’t a person, they’re a bit more like a government (they’re bigger than some nations) and very single minded in their pursuits. They don’t have the ability to turn around and go “apologies that I’m hurting people, I’ll actually change my ways and start following the values of your community now”.
Turns out I was wrong about the tracking and advertising they absolutely could do it and they absolutely will:
They could send ads masquerading as posts/comments and track you using images (since they are served from Meta’s servers similarly to how tracking works with images in emails
I didn’t think of that, if you federate then you essentially become a publisher of their ads and tracking. Ty for the link.
Here’s my not-at-all-qualified take:
Let the federation ride. If Threads users add meaningful content and activity, then cool.
But the second we see a Meta ad, pull that fucking plug. We should not be distributing their ads for free (or at all).
Once the cats out of the bag, it won’t want to go back in.
Meta don’t deserve any chances, I’m here to get away from that toxic bull and would much prefer it to be blocked from any instance I interact with.
Fully agreed, anyone who doesn’t either works for Meta or can’t see the writing on the wall about what this will do to the fediverse.
For completeness there was a discussion (outdated) a few months back on this for anyone interested: https://aussie.zone/post/401165
When I last looked at the defederations of some Mastodon servers, everyone was already blocking Threads. This was a year ago. Instances running Lemmy and Kbin and like should probably do the same.
This seems like a very important discussion but let me tell you how I came across it. It’s possible many others on Aussie Zone fall into a similar boat as mine. If not please ignore.
I only use Voyager to interact with Lemmy regularly. Occasionally I check out Aussie Zone via a browser but that’s very rare.
I think the ‘Default feed’ for Voyager is ‘Home’ which are the coms I’ve subbed to. I didn’t even know what ‘Local’ was until I looked it up just now (while trying to find out if Voyager can list all the coms of an instance like the coms page in a desktop browser, which I don’t think it does).
So I was surprised not to see this discussion earlier after seeing it pop up more broadly across the lemmyverse. Turns out that’s because I never selected the Local feed to see what everyone is talking about and because I wasn’t subbed to Meta (as in the Aussie Zone com, not the company) until now.
If my ignorance is unusual for Aussie Zone folk then please ignore this comment. If it’s possible that lots of other active or semi-active local users are not seeing this discussion is there any way to highlight it across the instance?
I’ve cross posted to Australia, locked and pinned which should get some attention from other users in your boat
it can get pinned by an admin, but i dont think thats nessarcery . you should subscribe to !meta@aussie.zone if you want to see posts about the instance itself.
I know you’ve worked it out now but here is my own personal take.
I’m not subscribed to any aussie.zone communities. I just use ‘Local’ and ‘New’ (‘New Comments’ also helps) to browse them all in one go after first looking at ‘Home’ in Voyager.
It’s why instance shopping by interest is important for some, using ‘Local’ becomes your community. Mastodon is similar, you join an instance that is related to you and ‘Local’ becomes another browsing tool. I am on aus.social so every now and again I use ‘Local’ to find posts from Aussies that weren’t hashtagged properly (knowing full well there are other australian instances that I’m missing).
If you were on lemmy.world, ‘Local’ would be waste. Too many posts.
Hey that New Comments tip is great. I think I might test out your method of not subbing local coms and using Local to check what’s happening and also subbing to fedded coms so they come up in Home. Cheers.
I presume this will be the case, but don’t think there’s been any official announcement yet. The majority of current servers have planned to resist by defederating.
I posted this link in a reply but I’ll put it here just incase. According to this part of the threads TOS by interacting with a threads user they will collect your data and send targeted ads.
https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/111585528118111249
How are they going to send targeted ads when not using their platform?
They could masquerade them as posts or embed them in posts. They would be able to track your IP address through the images they serve - kind of like email
I’m not sure that most Lemmy users have much to fear from Threads because it’s a microblogging thing which Lemmy isn’t. I
I’m on Kbin where there’s slightly more of a concern in theory because Kbin has microblogging capabilities baked in but I don’t think it’s used very much (I have a separate Mastodon account anyway and that’s where the real discussions about all this are happening understandably).
In practice I don’t know, I have a strong feeling Meta aren’t really interested in this corner of the fediverse right now, they want to be a Twitter-killer after all not a Reddit competitor. Which is why if you’re interested in the subject most of the actual debate is going on Mastodon or equivalents.
None of this is going against your main point necessarily, Meta are obviously very shady. But also innocent until proven guilty, you know? Most instances have a pretty solid code of law.
Mods are going to be in for a bumpy ride though…
This is how I think about this.Edit - this is what comes to mind when I think about this
Forgive my newbness, but is it up to instance owners to defederate? Or individual users? I don’t really know how it works.
Instance Admins
Thanks.
So this means I’ll be seeing what people post on threads in my lemmy app?
A few points to make on this topic:
- There is presently nobody to defederate from: They aren’t in the fediverse yet, and while we can guess they’ll use threads.net as their domain, that’s all it would be - a guess. There is no point preemptively defederating from that domain when we don’t even know it’s what they’ll use in federation.
- Defederating is trivial from the instance level. Just type their domain to the “blocked instances” setting and it’s done for everyone. This move can be made at any time in under a minute.
- A change to the behaviour of aussie.zone this large will likely be passed by the users in some way. It’s not a thing to undertake lightly.
- The new Lemmy allows users to block instances for them personally. If you don’t want to personally interract with Threads, just add them to your block list and it’s done. You won’t see anything from that instance. It’ll also mean you won’t see replies to their comments made from here. *
* You can’t actually defederate from them yet, as the “block instance” UI searches for federated domains and won’t permit you to add threads.net as that domain is not federated. You’ll need to do this if/when they actually federate with the rest of us.