As you’ve probably heard, Threads (a fairly new social network from Facebook’s parent company Meta) is testing integration with the fediverse. Depending on how you look at it, it’s a great opportunity, a huge threat, or both!
Back in May and June, when Threads’ first announced their plans, there were quite a few polls on Mastodon about people’s reactions, most showing opinions split roughly equally. How do people feel today?
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was no
still is no
I’m so disappointed that it isn’t an overwhelming majority of votes against federating with Meta. How do most people not realize this is just their chance to take advantage of the fediverse? And like haven’t we heard enough bad things about Meta to avoid them?
I am extremely against federating with Threads.
Meta are war criminals. Period.
If you support Meta attaching to the fediverse, you are welcoming war criminals and their quislings to becoming part of the fediverse.
I sincerely hope most of us in the fediverse are better than that or I’m going to have to search for a new social media home.
Meta has been a willing tool for enabling war crimes, genocide, political manipulation/propaganda, and brutal authoritarianism all across the globe.
I still feel strongly against it.
I’ll possibly end up leaving the Fediverse and finding a nice forum where I know corpos will never ruin.
Does anyone know a decently sized mastodon instance that’s defederated from Threads? I need to move from mastodon.world which wants to wait and see what Threads does. I moved to mastodon to get away from mainstream social media and I don’t want any of Threads content in my feed. So please suggest some instances!
You can simply not follow people on Threads and you will have no Threads content in your feed
Doesn’t posts that people I follow boost that’s on Threads also show up?
You can block the entire domain.
Lots of them actually
Meta has a very bad track record, but on the other hand I would be happy to be able to follow famous people that are only on Threads from my privacy-respecting services.
I see Threads federation something like an RSS feed. It’s not inherently bad per se.
More awareness is always good to take. That’s said my own personal instance will defederate because damn meta
For me personally there are two main forces at play here:
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I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don’t use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.
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Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it’s a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.
I don’t really know for sure, but I’d have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty fucking narrow. We’d be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it’d also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it…
So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.
I’m perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I’m willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).
From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.
From a cultural standpoint, I’m also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc… Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase–and that’s the Fediverse working as intended, imo.
I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.
Let’s not forget war crimes and genocide.
I can see from your other post that you’re talking about Facebook’s role in the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar, right? I think this part of the wikipedia article is relevant to the conversation:
The internet.org initiative was brought to Myanmar in 2015. Myanmar’s relatively recent democratic transition did not provide the country with substantial time to form professional and reliable media outlets free from government intervention. Furthermore, approximately 1% of Myanmar’s residents had internet access before internet.org. As a result, Facebook was the primary source of information and without verifiable professional media options, Facebook became a breeding ground for hate speech and disinformation. “Rumors circulating among family or friends’ networks on Facebook were perceived as indistinguishable from verified news by its users.”[227] Frequent anti-Rohingya sentiments included high Muslim birthrates, increasing economic influence, and plans to takeover the country. Myanmar’s Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees. [Emphasis added by me, btw.]
Like I said above, I got off Facebook more than a decade ago and I don’t use their products. As a platform it has been very well documented that Facebook has been a hive for disinformation and social unrest in [probably] every country and language on Earth. You and I might avoid Facebook and Meta like a plague, but the sad truth is that Facebook has become ubiquitous all over the world for all kinds of communication and business. Weirdos like us are here on the fediverse, but the average person has never even heard of this shit, don’t you agree?
So what’s my point? Why is any of that relevant?
As true as it is that Facebook was complicit in the atrocities in Myanmar (as well as social unrest and chaos on a global scale), a key component there is centralization, imo.
There are an estimated ~7,000 languages on Earth today across ~200 countries. To put it bluntly, what I’m saying is that content moderation across every language and culture on Earth is infeasible, if not straight-up impossible. Facebook will never be able to do it, nor will Google, X, Bluesky, Tiktok, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other company. In light of that it’s actually shocking that Facebook had 2 Burmese speakers among their staff in the first place, considering many companies have 0. In other words, there is no single centralized social network on Earth who can combat against global disinformation, hate speech, etc. I think we can all agree to that. Hell, even Meta’s staff would probably agree to that.
So what’s the solution to disinformation, hate speech and civil unrest?
Frankly I’m not sure that there is one, simple solution, as the openness and freedom of the internet will always allow for someone, somewhere, to say and do bad things. But at the same time I strongly believe that federation and decentralization can be at least a part of the solution, as it give communities of every nation and language on Earth the power and agency to manage and moderate their own social networks.
I think you and I probably feel similarly about Facebook (and, for me at least, Tiktok, Instagram, X, and other toxic centralized corporate social networks that put profit about all else). After all, that’s why we’re talking here instead of there, right? I would much rather have everyone just leave Facebook for somewhere that is owned and controlled by individual communities. But that’s simply not in our power. And so, at least as I see it, ActivityPub becoming a widely-adopted standard for inter-network communication at least creates more opportunity for decentralization and community-moderation.
As long as Facebook remains the single dominant venue for communication and news across the world (and all of those ~7000 languages), we will continue to see linguistic minorities hurt the most by disinformation and hate on the internet.
The issue with Facebook and the Rohingya isn’t just that they “didn’t moderate properly”. It’s that they knew for a long time that it was a problem and chose to ignore it. Note those last four words: chose to ignore it. In that other thing I posted I linked to someone who brought the receipts. The higher-ups at Facebook at the time knew this was happening and chose to put their corporate goals over literally tens of thousands of lives. This is inexcusable.
The simple solution is to keep Meta contained. To shun those who support it with their labour, their money, or their personal information (indirectly money). I don’t want to interact with quislings and I won’t. Nor should anybody else repelled at their complete and utter apathy in the face of mass murder and genocide.
(Note: Twitter was no better. Fucking Jack “Dipshit” Dorsey was in Myanmar meditating with the very same Buddhist fucks that were behind the Rohingya genocide, singing out their praises all while this was going on.)
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Was no and still no. BTW, here’s me viewing a Threads profile from mastodon.world on Moshidon
The fediverse isnt a competition and nor we we should try to replace gaint companies(even tho that it would be great) rather stay as a free alternative to those platforms.
I hope they federate
why do you hope that?
I hate Reddit and Twitter both so I want the Fediverse to take off
Facebook/Threads will not be a good federation partner, same cesspool as Twitter.
I mostly just hate Spez and Elon, so Threads would be cool joining the Fediverse imo. Facebook should stay off tho, there’s nothing worthwhile there
Threads is by Facebook/Instagram though?
Yeah, but they’re separate, so I think they could federate Threads without federating Facebook
is by same people
Yeah, but they’re separate
They’re literally not.
Threads accounts are closely integrated with Instagram accounts. By default, Threads and Instagram accounts share the same username, profile picture, and display name, although the profile picture and display name can be customized. Users can choose which accounts they follow on Instagram will carry over to Threads, either with the other person’s Threads account already created or set to automatically follow them once an account is created.[36] As of August 2023, if a user decides to terminate their Threads account, they must delete their associated Instagram account as well.[37] Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, has acknowledged this limitation and stated that they are exploring options for a user to delete only their Threads account.[38]
Users are required to have an Instagram account to use Threads. Threads is a companion app to Instagram, and it uses Instagram to authenticate the user’s identity and connect with their network.[32]
do you hate facebook
I don’t like meta as a company.
But I don’t want to exclude a bunch of people just because they decided to use a server owned by meta. It’s not like the server is a community dedicated to hurting people or promoting hate speech or something, and I don’t want to punish people just because they’re not savvy enough to understand the problems with meta. Let them federate and just don’t follow any of them if you’re not interested in any of them.
Defederating isn’t going to benefit us or hurt meta, it’s just gonna hurt the people who use threads.
But I don’t want to exclude a bunch of people just because they decided to use a server owned by meta.
I do.
You make the fediverse a worse place, if your default is to arbitrarily exclude and gatekeep against people unlike you, as it seems to be.
The people on Tumblr are entirely unlike me … but I have no issues federating with Tumblr.
You might want to consider why this is the case.
I’d say you may want to consider why this is the case. If you’re OK federating tumblr (which I agree with), but not ok federating threads, even if defederating threads won’t impact Meta at all and only negatively affects thread users - that seems pretty hypocritical and unnecessarily spiteful towards normies.
It’s not normies I’m spiteful toward. It’s MOTHERFUCKING META. The fact that the normies are going and supporting a known abuser with almost two decades’ worth of fucking everything up is a “them” problem, not a “me” problem.
And once again I repeat: Defederating won’t hurt meta. They can likely already harvest all the user data they would get from federation.
So you’re senselessly taking your take against meta out on normies.
Dude, go to fucking Meta if you want to talk to fucking Meta’s ragebait monkeys. The “normies” as you put it are welcome in the fediverse as far as I’m concerned, just not fucking META. Nothing but sloth is preventing the “normies” from getting into the fediverse.
Now go fuck off and troll elsewhere.
Defederating isn’t going to benefit us or hurt meta, it’s just gonna hurt the people who use threads.
…Good. they should move their happy asses to a normal, non-ghoul of a corporation run mastodon server, if it pains them so.
It is a mastodon server. A mastodon server run by meta. So how exactly is defederation going to benefit you?
Check my edit. And it benefits me by meta can eat a bag of dicks.
this wont cause meta to eat a bag of dicks. it doesn’t actually hurt meta if you defederate with them. if they want to harvest data, they can already do that by standing up their own activitypub server and just subscribing to everything.
not everyone is as technically savvy as we are, or as aware of corporate politics as we are. as much as I think they should be, they arent, and so they use facebook and threads and twitter. I dont think we should exclude them on the sole basis of their ignorance in this particular area.
Most people don’t care about that shit as much as we do. and if a social network doesn’t have a good supply of normies, then it devolves into a circlejerk cesspit real quick.
Your word choice is just bizarre. Nobody would be excluded, they’d only have to make a profile on a different, normal server. And nobody would be “hurt” by not having access to Lemmy’s memes about Linux and similar stuff.
just don’t follow any of them if you’re not interested in any of them
Except that theoretically my “All” feed would still be full of garbage-tier content that people typically expect and post on Meta’s services, and that userbase with its same mindset would eventually spill over into the communities that I do follow too.
Your response isn’t self consistent.
they’d only have to make a profile on a different, normal server my “All” feed would still be full of garbage-tier content that people typically expect and post on Meta’s services
If they make a profile on a normal server then your feed will be full of that same content you don’t want. You’re trying to exclude users, not meta itself.
Besides, you keep taking as though they’re federating with Lemmy. They’re not, they’re federating with mastodon. Having mastodon posts show up automatically in your Lemmy feeds is unusual. Kbin, maybe.
It can be both a “good” opportunity and bad but given the way Meta had to change its name to Meta after getting into trouble with running its platform to encourage fascism in national election outcomes … I think it’s safe to say the good that could possibly come of the federation does not outweigh the probable bad. I don’t agree with anything Zuckerfuck touches being anything close to reasonable to work with. Meta/Facebook’s track record isn’t something to ignore.
the whole point of federation is networks being able to connect to each other. it will hopefully be a matter of course in the future.
is also decentralization
threads have 141 million users ._.
I’m pretty sure they don’t have that many, Threads too, a steep hit:
Meta’s Twitter rival Threads sees steep drop in daily users by 80 per cent, report says
Do you have independent numbers to back up your statement?
is still disproportionate amount
20 million compared to 1.5 million per day isn’t that huge of a jump considering threads probably has a shit ton more bots.
yes is
20 million for only one node
I don’t see how it’s a threat. They can’t take over the whole federation.
Sure they can. Like Google took over XMPP.
So how would they take PixelFed, Mastodon, Lemmy & Kbin / Mbin? They can only try add a feature and if the rest of the Fediverse doesn’t like it, they won’t add it to there own platforms,
