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”.

  • Creatortray@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • Cypher@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • danc4498@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • Dieinahole@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          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

            • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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              11 months ago

              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.

        • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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          11 months ago

          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.

        • PopOfAfrica@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          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.

              • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                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.

                • PopOfAfrica@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  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.

                  • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
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                    11 months ago

                    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?!

        • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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          11 months ago

          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.

      • Creatortray@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • Spuddlesv2@lemmy.ca
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          11 months ago

          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.

    • Dieinahole@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      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

      • Creatortray@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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

      • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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        11 months ago

        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.

      • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Why in THE FUCK would meta notice, or care, at fucking all?

        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.

      • G020B@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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          11 months ago

          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.

      • Freeman@feddit.de
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        11 months ago

        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

      • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          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.

    • APassenger@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • Sanyanov@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • MrSilkworm@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        this ☝️. Those of us who remember what happened then, understand the potential dangers of federating with a juggernaut like META.

        We should tread lightly!

      • Lucia [she/her]@eviltoast.org
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        11 months ago

        As a result, XMPP became worse off than it started and got practically forgotten by all but 1,5 nerds who keep it alive.

        Is it even true? I doubt XMPP was ever popular outside of google’s talk.

            • nakal@kbin.social
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              11 months ago

              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.

              • kpw@kbin.social
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                11 months ago

                XMPP works great on mobile devices today. Google could have easily developed and published such extensions themselves.

          • kpw@kbin.social
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            11 months ago

            Why? It works great for me and my contacts. I use it for all my personal messaging.

            • Spuddlesv2@lemmy.ca
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              11 months ago

              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.

              • kpw@kbin.social
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                11 months ago

                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.

        • kpw@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          This. I don’t care what Google or Meta do, I will never use their services.

    • Nelfaneor@mastodon.zaclys.com
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      11 months ago

      @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

    • LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.