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”.
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.
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.
I just don’t think it’s possible for something to kill the fediverse. And if it is possible, then it is a flaw in the design of the fediverse and needs to be fixed.
Are you planning to pay for the extra bandwith to deal with all the additional traffic?
Meta will.
And then when they own the servers amd all the traffic, lemmy will be quietly murdered.
Quietly, because they’ll control the traffic, and therefore the narrative
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Today no.
Come make your instance on Meta™ it’s free™!! Its fast! It’s yours!!
Then later they’ll wreck havoc on our small servers making them slow and unreliable, making their servers even more interesting for people. And so on.
And that’s just one way among lots of ways.
I love that your fear is they will be successful and the lemmy devs and admins don’t have their shit together or a plan to handle anything but a small niche headcount.
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Lololol 3 responses hurts those servers so baaad!
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All activity pub needed to do was create a user rights guidelines that prevents profiting off the data. Meta wouldn’t have touched the Fediverse with the 10-foot pole, if that were the case.
Lololol and what legal mechanism are you going to use to enforce that?
ActivityPub is a protocol, not a fucking organization. It literally has no agency.
You can licence a protocol
ActivityPub can’t license anything. When you identify actual human beings in this conversation, perhaps you might have a point. So far you don’t.
First off, calm the hell down. You’re being needlessly antagonistic.
Secondly, it seems like the W3C is the publisher of the activity pub standard seems like they ducats what is an isnt compliant.
Seems like of was specifically authored by a team including Evan Prodromou according to the wiki.
If they wanted too, but like literally and open source software, it could have been given licencing requirements
Specifically, my research has turned up that implementations of these protocols can be licensed. Threads’ version of ActivityPub likely has its own licence. I think it would be safe to say that the creators of Lemmy and Mastodon specifically could have privacy rights dictated within their license implementation. That would nullify threads legal capabilities.
You don’t “implement” a license. For fuck’s sake could you at least learn the terminology of a domain before spouting opinions on it?!
People have been writing about this ad nauseum. It’s the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. Join fediverse, extend the spec with so that not all clients are compatible with all features, repeat as necessary until everyone is using your client, finally drop compatibility with other clients.
My sweet summer child.
With a network that big, they have to be very careful, and really try, if they don’t want our servers to just go kaboom.
Or we just defederate from any of those attempts.
Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.
This is an excellent point. Thanks!
in that case considering meta is saying that it would take nearly a year to federate the platform we probably should defederate them.
What point in that linked blog swayed you? The circumstances are quite different. XMPP was dogshit when Google started working with it. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
Just think:
Meta has literal billions of users.
The entire fediverse has about 1.5 million.
Less than a fraction of a percent.
Why in THE FUCK would meta notice, or care, at fucking all? The entire fediverse of traffic ported over to meta wouldn’t budge their advertising bottom line.
But, it’s a comparatively small group of smart people, having conversations, and profiles they don’t have tabs and near total control over.
There’s news about cop city and gaza I have seen here that I’ve seen NOWHERE else.
Don’t let them control the narrative here
Well, then, let’s make our point I’ll just email the holders of the instances I’m on and let them know I support defederating threads
The fediverse is an emerging threat. It’s not ready yet, but it’s on the right trajectory. Every time there’s angst on some other platform, the fediverse get’s a bump. Fediverse is not a real competitor yet, perhaps it never will be, but for meta it’s sensible to establish a presence here in the short term, because it may be much more difficult later.
Why do people ask rhetorical questions without following through?!
This is a question that should be asked. If, indeed, the fediverse is so unimportant WHY THE FLYING FUCK IS META INTERESTED IN FEDERATING WITH IT!?!? THAT is the question people should be asking, given that Meta does nothing that isn’t designed to add more money to Zuck the Fuck’s portfolio.
And yet … most people (for clarity, I don’t mean you here!) don’t ask that question. They don’t take that question you ask and wonder beyond that first kneejerk level. Use that question instead as a “LOL Meta doesn’t care about the fediverse” piece of evidence.
And this is why we can’t have nice things.
But that’s good. Meta doesn’t care about Lemmy or Mastodon because they’re tiny. Threads is a threat to Twitter. They want to integrate with Mastodon just because Twitter doesn’t. That’s it.
They’re not going for “total control” of your conversation about Gaza. You are not important to them. You are not the main character in some David and Goliath story. There are only Goliaths.
Do you know why Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram? Instagram wasn’t worth that much. It wasn’t generating a billion dollars in revenue. It probably still doesn’t.
Facebook bought Instagram because Instagram was a growing app that was popular with a demographic Facebook wanted to control. They spent a billion dollars to eliminate a growing threat.
Mastodon and, to a lesser extent, Lemmy, represent a growing threat. Not a very big one right now, but it could become a bigger one. It could become another billion dollar problem for the goliaths on the Internet, in a few years. They need to have total control, if a social media app starts to fragment it just collapses instead as users decide to go wherever the other users are.
Facebook’s 1000:1 user ratio would make Lemmy irrelevant and stave off that billion dollar problem for Facebook down the road. An incredibly cheap way to kill a tiny but growing competitor.
That’s the case whether or not you federate with Threads. But if you do, that’s not going to matter because you can freely communicate with people on Threads.
Threads doesnt have that much users I think. Fb, insta and whatsapp do have a lot of users but I dont expect a lot of users comming from there
There is one big reason why they would care - antitrust and EU regulation protection. They have no intention to destroy the platform Rather they want to please the regulators as they are leveraging the open standards. The EEE strategy is a conspiracy theory. Government regulations are the most probable reason for this change.
Dude, even if it isn’t straight out EEE they’ll just drown us, and eventually kill us because if whatever reason. It doesn’t even have anything to do with Lemmy, they have to manuver carefully if they want to let us live.
Do you have a Lemmy server that can take the load off of a billion user network? I have one and it for sure can’t.
Meta will be okay making money off lemmy indirectly for a while. Then, if they grow, they’ll want more than a toehold.
When it’s Facebook, trust that greed and power are the goals.
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.
this ☝️. Those of us who remember what happened then, understand the potential dangers of federating with a juggernaut like META.
We should tread lightly!
Is it even true? I doubt XMPP was ever popular outside of google’s talk.
Xmpp’s popularity isn’t the point.
The point is google intentionally killed it
How do you define if a communication protocol is dead? I use XMPP everyday, it works just well.
Also, I doubt that Google wanted to destroy XMPP. They simply needed a chat then noticed it’s crap for mobile devices. They wanted to offer their users seemless migration to the new proprietary protocol.
I was sad that Google stopped to use an official standard, but there are many better free options left.
XMPP works great on mobile devices today. Google could have easily developed and published such extensions themselves.
Not even a little bit. XMPP was rubbish.
Why? It works great for me and my contacts. I use it for all my personal messaging.
When Google started using XMPP in Talk, 20 years ago, it was crap. I haven’t used it in probably 15 years but it wasn’t great then either.
Then it must have gotten a lot better in the meantime then. I discovered it ~2020 while searching for alternatives to WhatsApp and realizing that other walled gardens cannot be the answer since they have the same problem as WhatsApp. I think we should revive the idea of an universal internet standard for instant messaging.
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@Creatortray
You’ve just written it : their negative reputation for easaly understandable reasons. We can already foresee Threads will very soon be used to spread the most toxic campaigns on the net and that will undoubtably harm the Fediverse. One of the most valuable trait of the Fediverse is its decentralization and consequently, the potential accountability of any server administrator. Why should we take those risks when it’s so easy to avoid it? #BlockThreadsOut
@mypasswordis1234
@Nelfan @Creatortray @mypasswordis1234 if my server federates with #Threads and it creates a problem, I’ll stop supporting it and move to one that doesn’t.
@boiglenoight @Nelfan @Creatortray @mypasswordis1234
Great toot, Nelfaneor, but to use the word ‘risk’ with respect to the probability of #falseBook creating harm in the #fediverse network, is a mistake — it is a “certainty”.
Boiglenoight if you value the free and open web we have news for you, your instance is having its HTTPS intercepted by Cloud(G)lare (change ‘G’ to ‘F’). Move to a different one, if you want us to continue dialog with you.
It’ll be successful and the current devs will lose the ability to unilaterally control the project.
So competition, that’s what they are afraid of.