It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:
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Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)
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Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)
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Defederate (wait and see)
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Defederate with the intention of staying defederated
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Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too
It’s all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.
In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?
I’m not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.
Choice 2. 5 is ridiculous and more harmful to the fediverse than the worst case of EEE.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Would be funny, if major instances are choosing option 5, making many communities divided and useless, right before Meta announces, that they don’t plan on federating with Lemmy instances. And that Threads will only federate with Tumblr lol
Seriously tho, how will Threads impact Lemmy anyways? They don’t have communities there, right? Their posts will probably not show up here regardless of federated or defederated, if I understand correctly.
You can follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon.
But have you actually tried it? Here’s a sample. Go take a look. (EDIT: My link is worthless unless you are logged in to mas.to. Go look up username fediverse@lemmy.world in your Mastodon client of choice)
It’s a completely unmanageable firehose of comments, spewed only in chronological order.
Honestly, the link between incompatible types of social media like Lemmy and Mastodon could be severed in my opinion, because it’s mostly just novel with little benefit.
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.
As an instance admin, lol.
I’m paying for the server. I’m handling all the maintenance, moderation, etc. You’re out of your mind if you think I’m gonna allow nazis or whatever other horrible shit is out there anywhere near my instance. I’m not going to enable bigotry. Fuck that.
Everyone can see my instance’s TOS as well as who I’ve defederated and why. If they don’t like it, they can find another instance. They’re not entitled to an account on mine.
It gives this power to anyone willing to shell out a fiver a month.
Yeah that’s something I’ve not seen discussed here much. I get that people want control, but getting started with an ActivityPub centric site (like kbin) is now cheaper than ever. Get your own cheap hosting on a VPS and handle some traffic.
People can even create their own instances just to federate with everyone and absorb their content if they’re worried about the rules and regulations or “x server not connecting with y”
Overall I think it’s a pretty good system compared to a single silo like Reddit
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 get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
Means the instance isn’t part of the hive mind and we obviously can’t have that!
I am a fediverse enthusiast and I am excited for Threads federating. I hope it incentivises Tumblr to federate also and then we actually finally have proper choice.
I see you’re not familiar with EEE. This is a classic move by enterprise to kill an open competitor.
I am. How could they kill the fediverse? If they tried to kill it, it would only return to how things was. Chances are tumblr could join in and then they couldn’t easily extinguish it.
Ever heard of XMPP?
If a single party participating in an open standard is large enough, they can go off the track, and then kill off interoperability.
But this isn’t a single party. Mastodon and Lemmy and Kbin are well established
I don’t get this platform. I’m about to just give up on social media altogether.
I just want to know about new games and whatever else that interests me. Why’s that so hard.
You really don’t need to care about whatever’s happening with Threads as a casual user
You do need to care as a casual about data miners that would love to sell your info to health insurance companies and crackhead conspiracy theorists.
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.
5 is an absolutely horrible idea.
1 and 2 are best
If 9 regular people sit down with a nazi without protest, you have 10 nazis. Threads will absolutely not stop nazis from posting nazi stuff. We know this because Facebook is full of nazis. Why would anyone want nazis at their table? Because they’re nazis. Anyone who wants to federate with Threads is a nazi. Do you want to federate with nazis? Option 5 is really the only way to keep the nazis away from the table. This is not an exaggeration. There are literal nazis given free reign on Facebook. There will be literal nazis given free reign on Threads. If you don’t stop the nazis because you want to interact with your friends who interact with nazis, you’re enabling nazis. Don’t enable nazis. I can’t stress enough they are literally nazis.
I get your point, but by the time I finished reading your comment my brain stopped registering nazi as anything more than a series of letters