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”.
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.
Excuse me sir, i cant be more agree with you
me too ^_^
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed it is, they’re not saying you have to make an account on that person’s server, they’re saying that you can make it on a different server, that’s the point of federation you can join other servers that are connected to them. It’s not to be fully open without any limitations, because if it were then content moderation would be impossible.
Services like Nostr have this problem, they are like the wild West where anything goes and you can’t do anything about it. To some people that seems great but the fact of the matter is those services are filled with right-wing trolls and crypto scammers (likely plenty of other nasty stuff as well) because they cannot be moderated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.”
This is a bigger issue to leave it to users imo. Like lemm.ee admin said a few months ago, threads is too fucking big.
Anything they push on the fediverse will be what users see in All. Plus, popular stuff on threads is determined through Facebook’s algorithm, and it will also determine the fediverse recommendations by consequence.
The above is solvable if you block them I guess, but by default it will completely ruin everything.
However, lemmy 0.19 block feature doesn’t work on users of an instance, only posts hosted in an instance. Add to this that Facebook is a cancerous company making all its money from ads. Expect their bots to comment and make posts pushing ads on all instances.
All of this will also mean high workload on mods to regulate the content. Threads doesn’t bring anything good here, and defederation is probably the only way to protect us.
The above is solvable if you block them I guess, but by default it will completely ruin everything.
Yes. One minute of a user’s time and all that’s gone.
Compare that with having to move instances due to admins blocking at the instance level.
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.
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 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 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?
Leave it to users. Let people decide what they want to see.
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!
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 was dead on arrival.
In favor of defederation. If I start seeing garbage from threads in my feed, I’m switching instances. I don’t want Meta pushing their divisive, hateful, misinformation all up in my feeds. Meta will kill fedi. We don’t need them.
“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.
I hate Zuck and Facebook as much as the next person, but I think the rollout is going slowly enough that we don’t need to fight about it yet.
The discussion is important and needs to be had, but it’s premature.
Everywhere this pops up, the users have decided:
Fuck meta. Fuck threads. Fuck the zuck.
Do not associate. Defederate now
Just block their domain, no need to take away the freedom of other users even if you hate Meta.
And get my server hoggud up by 1.000.000 biased meta shitposts a minute? No thanks.
That’s not how federation works, which makes me worried that users who get to “vote” on this thing (they don’t, it’s the instance owners that do) actually do not understand what would happen.
It’s exactly what would happen, as users on my server would look up instances on meta servers.
The best case scenario of letting Meta in is neutrality. Far more likely is then actively destroying stuff. Remember, their motto is move fast and break things
So what are they going to do?
The whole “Oh they’ll microsoft it!”-narrative is clearly false already. As plenty people said the last time someone posted that sensationalist “how to kill the fediverse” (or so) blog post already, this is not about Meta trying to “kill” the fediverse. If anything, the opposite. This is them Mozilla-ing it, using it as a defense against new regulations. They can even point to instances defederating en masse as “See? We tried! They’re all blocking us, so it’s not our fault this cross-compatibility isn’t working.” and then in the future use that as a defense against further attempts to open up walled gardens. They tried, the supposedly “open” side actively blocked it, now the other side has to move before they try again.
People misunderstand the actually extremely obvious reason they’re doing this. There’s also an easy reason they’re dragging their feet so much: They don’t want to. But they have to. So they promise they’ll federate, actively hope they get blocked (see above), and only actually do it last-second to avoid issues with new legislation.
So naive.
deleted by creator
no one cares if you leave. literally no one.
Yeah, close that protocol! Build the walls around our garden higher! No need to wait for them to actually do something worth defederating over, we just don’t like them!
This is silly. A major social media network is trying to join the Fediverse and everyone’s keen on stopping it. If Meta does something dirty or damaging, sure, defederate them then. But I was kind of hoping that open protocols would flourish, not just end up as another bunch of balkanized forums and Reddit-likes.
Ever play Plague Inc? The secret to winning is to not become deadly until you’ve already become engrained and established throughout society. Then you add the deadly features once you’re too deep in.
Don’t let the cancer establish itself as something innocent. The owner of the platform WILL take any opportunity to seize control of the media so it can seize control of the message.
This IS Facebook. It’s guaranteed. They’re evil. Block them now.
I’d personally at least give them a chance. Defederating is a pretty easy process and can be performed at any point in time. At least some Threads users may as well get to know about Lemmy and switch to it.
Upd: yes I do understand many people don’t trust Meta and neither do I. But I also understand lots and lots of users here are using anonymous accounts, and federation information is already public to begin with. Combining the fact that Fediverse may gain more than it may lose, including more users, original content, recognition and etc, I generally think it’s worth the risk. I am generally content with any decision, just sharing my two pennies of thought.
How about users make decisions for themselves and block Threads if they want?
I think the issue here is users data will be on threads server which god knows how it will be used. To train AI? To target ads ? Nobody knows so better everyone block threads and keep internet safe as these companies have destroyed internet.
Public Mastodon posts are already indexed by search engines.
Indexing by search engines and what Meta harvests are astronomically different - I fail to see your point.
If I am on Mastodon, there is nothing that Threads can collect from me that they can not get already. My posts are public, Meta or anyone else doesn’t need permission to look at them.
The only risk is if I am sending direct messages to someone on Threads from Mastodon, then obviously Meta has a copy. ActivityPub is not E2E encrypted, you shouldn’t be using it for private communication at all, the threat model is the same between Threads and any other Mastodon server.
Alright, fair enough, but why would anyone allow meta even an inch of space into a ‘free’ platform? Have you seen the numerous ( and to be fair, much better articulated) comments on this very thread concerning “EEE”? Don’t you think it’s alarming how many people support Meta joining?
I’m thinking of it from a grand scale: Folks in this thread are essentially saying “awe, c’mon, it’s probably okay if Zuck’s mega-corp puts it’s foot in the door of a burgeoning federated forum community; what could go wrong?”
Hey- let’s talk in five years and see what happens- yeah?
Alright, fair enough, but why would anyone allow meta even an inch of space into a ‘free’ platform?
It’s an open protocol, they can join if they want. That’s kinda the point of being an open protocol, anyone willing to implement it just can.
I imagine that if tomorrow Meta decides to run a free email service ala Hotmail or Gmail you’d be demanding that they will destroy email everywhere if they aren’t put on every black hole list immediately?
I can kinda see the point, but also without providing actual reasons, this post just seems like a LARP.
I got a reason! It’s because people are afraid meta is doing what Microsoft did to a much earlier project. The crux of that whole story is that Microsoft adopted the new tech, became the biggest player thus dominating the area, then, when they had full control of the tech they ended up shutting it down. Some people are convinced meta is going to do that to the fediverse.
This is vague and handwavy, I’m hoping someone actually knows the name of the project. It was early 90s I believe or maybe into the early 00s but it was before my time in the tech sphere of the internet.
Okay. I’ve seen stuff like this on both mastodon, and here, but i haven’t heard about them doing anything that would actually harm the fediverse. I guess i don’t know what the problem is. I know they’ve got a negative reputation, and for good reason, but isn’t that the awesome part of threads being federated? We can follow and connect to people there without being part of their system, and therefor not susceptible to their bs? If I’m missing something please fill me in.
People are concerned because there were examples of such things going horribly wrong, most notably with Google and XMPP.
Way back in the day, Google announced that its Talk messenger will support XMPP, which made decentralization fans very happy - finally, they can communicate with everyone from the comfort of their decentralized instance!..oh.
Google started implementing features in Talk that are incompatible with XMPP, and then dropped XMPP support altogether, ending up deprecating Talk in favor of Google-only Hangouts. This forced many XMPP users to get into Google’s ecosystem, since the people they contacted through XMPP were mostly just using Google Talk, and they couldn’t be contacted through XMPP any more. As a result, XMPP became worse off than it started and got practically forgotten by all but 1,5 nerds who keep it alive.
now most of their contacts were in defederated Google to which they now didn’t have access.
It is inevitable that Meta will try to kill the fediverse while chasing profits, there is no other possibility in their endgame.
If that is pushing ads into other instances or killing those instances entirely we don’t know yet but it will happen.
It has to because the shareholders must always have more.