Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to
What I hate to see, even in this thread, is people turning on each other in this “us vs. them”, “you’re either a part of the pact or you’re against us” nonsense
Let’s all remember why WE ALL CHOSE to get on the fediverse and build it. The strength of the fediverse comes from the freedom for each instance to choose how to run things. My understanding is that no one in an instance is harmed if some other instance chooses to federate or defederate from Threads.
I hate Meta. I also know that Meta doesn’t need to do anything to take down the fediverse if we do it ourselves.
Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.
Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.
Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.
“The flood of crap” isn’t what people should be worried about. They should be worried about Meta embracing, extending, and extinguishing the Fediverse. There’s a good article about this here. People are worried about the wrong things and don’t realize what’s at stake.
Well that and the story while not “wrong”, is definitely hyperbolic. The author even stated after stating that Google killed XMPP that they didn’t. So which is it? I’m not a dev, but an avid open source fan. i first tried Linux in 1995. Started using jabber itself in 1999 through Gaim. Later pidgin and psi clients in 2001-2. There were a ton of problems beyond Google. As far as clients were concerned there was no reference version. And there really were no large professionally run servers like mastodon.social or lemmy.world. People, myself included put too much hope in the Google basket. It was a massive unearned win in user count. That was just as easily lost. And kept people from focusing on the core service. Yes Google was never a good steward. Corporations never are. But the lack of official clients and servers, plus their decision to persue IETF standardization had as big or bigger impact on the services development and adoption.
The moral of the story isn’t that Google or anyone else can kill an open source project. Microsoft Google and many more have tried and failed. The moral is that we shouldn’t cater to them or give them special treatment. They aren’t the key to success.
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here.
It’s not about pulling the plug. It’s about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it’s going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they’ve never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
So basically, the worst thing Meta could do is what the defederators are actively campaigning for: To make it impossible for Threads and the Fediverse to communicate.
Defederating from known-bad-actor corporations during the “embrace” phase seems like a perfectly wise choice to me. Keeps them from getting to stage 2.
If you federate with something too massive though it has undue weight on the entire system. It is likely to be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish again, and it’s reasonable to want to avoid that.
For people who don’t remember, the pattern would be something like:
Federate and use the existing ecosystem to help you grow and to grow mutually (Embrace)
Add new features that only work locally, drawing users away from other instances to your own (Extend)
Defederate - the remainder is left with a fraction of the users since many moved away, so the users on the local instance don’t care. (Extinguish)
It depends whether 2 actually succeeds at pulling users in. Arguably most people already on the Fediverse are unlikely to jump ship to Facebook, but you have to consider what happens in a few years if it’s grown, but Facebook is a huge name which makes people less likely to join other instances.
Facebook has for 20 years proven time and time again that it cannot be trusted and it is not beneficial for Internet users.
Yet still dumbarse cry over how mean we are to not want them here.
Get this through your fucking head people, Facebook does not have your best intentions at heart. You exist in this space purely for them to exploit. And they will find a way to do so here because that is their whole existence as a company.
I don’t know if the fear is well rooted, but I can definitely understand how Facebook is perceived as not having established a history of trust.
They are a private company, which have placed profits above the best interests of its users.
Edit: I think you can draw a parallel with another scenario: an open and free market requires regulation. There should be rules and boundaries, such that a true free and open market exists. Similarly, there’s an argument to be made than we should restrict the fediverse for it to keep existing in the way we want it to.
Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
Users are more aware of the risk now. “Oh you should go use Google Talk, it’s an open standard” is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, “you should use Threads, it’s an open standard” would be absurd. The value here is “you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it’s a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users”.
It’s important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft’s tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google’s javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.
Forgive me for repeating this, but I think it’s a great analogy and explains all of our thoughts about it:
I’ve used this analogy before, but threads is like a huge, 5k passenger cruise ship docking in a small town in Alaska. You don’t have to know ahead of time that the 2 public bathrooms, one at the general store and the other at McDonalds, aren’t going to be enough. You can also forecast the complaining about how everything isn’t really tourist ready. It will suck for everyone. The small museum will be overrun and damaged, the people will be treated like dirt. It’s an easy forecast.
Here’s the important bit, just because they’ve never been in the cruise line business, doesn’t mean you have to give them a chance to ruin your town.
Thank you, someone finally looking big picture. I see a lot of folks talking about things like “it won’t harm Threads” or “the federation is all about inclusiveness and joining together” and those people, while correct on paper, are missing the point.
Put simply, many instances would prefer not to deal with that unnatural influx, and that is their choice. In fact, the best part of the fediverse is not only that they CAN make that choice it’s that they can UNDO it later if need be. I can’t fault some of these smaller instances for being proactive in protecting themselves when few here really know what goes into running and moderating.
Yes. My personal guess is that they want to start Threads as just another Federation instance where people build communities and relationships across instances as they do already, and act like a good Fediverse instance, all friendly and open and free . . . and then once there’s enough popularity and/or cross-traffic they will wall off the Threads portion and monetize access, so you’re forced to either pay up to continue in the parts you like and are invested in, or walk away leaving everything you put into it to Meta and paying users.
Oh, and they’ll suck up as much Fediverse data as they can too, while they’re at it: anything they have access to will be hoovered up for their commercial use, just as it is now. Federating means that all federated traffic will be propagated to Meta servers in due course, and we all know Meta has zero intention of being bound by any agreements in regard to the data of others, regardless of what platitudes they mouth.
On a personal level, I don’t give a shit whether lemmy.world federates with Threads, but only because I have already made the decision personally not to participate in ANYTHING Meta, and that includes here on the Fediverse.
I’m already here because Reddit pulled that same shit, and I walked away then too. I learned my lesson. No way will I knowingly cross that line into personally investing time and attention into what Meta could wall off at any time and monetize without recourse for anyone who does make that mistake.
And I’d rather they not have my data, but it’s not like I’m in any position to stop or prevent it. Best I can do is stay away from all Meta products, apps, trackers, and cookies.
TL;DR: People can do what they want with Threads, federate or don’t, participate or don’t, just know that Meta can and will wall it off at any time and expect participants to pay in some way to continue.
People seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about why Threads is adding ActivityPub support. It’s not to destroy the fediverse. The fediverse is not in competition with Threads.
Have you looked into the process of actually spinning up your own Mastodon instance? It’s not exactly the good old days of throwing together a LAMP box and installing PHPBB on it.
Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to
What I hate to see, even in this thread, is people turning on each other in this “us vs. them”, “you’re either a part of the pact or you’re against us” nonsense
Let’s all remember why WE ALL CHOSE to get on the fediverse and build it. The strength of the fediverse comes from the freedom for each instance to choose how to run things. My understanding is that no one in an instance is harmed if some other instance chooses to federate or defederate from Threads.
I hate Meta. I also know that Meta doesn’t need to do anything to take down the fediverse if we do it ourselves.
Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.
Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.
Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.
“The flood of crap” isn’t what people should be worried about. They should be worried about Meta embracing, extending, and extinguishing the Fediverse. There’s a good article about this here. People are worried about the wrong things and don’t realize what’s at stake.
The Ploum article again. Please explain how the circumstances with XMPP and ActivityPub are remotely similar.
Well that and the story while not “wrong”, is definitely hyperbolic. The author even stated after stating that Google killed XMPP that they didn’t. So which is it? I’m not a dev, but an avid open source fan. i first tried Linux in 1995. Started using jabber itself in 1999 through Gaim. Later pidgin and psi clients in 2001-2. There were a ton of problems beyond Google. As far as clients were concerned there was no reference version. And there really were no large professionally run servers like mastodon.social or lemmy.world. People, myself included put too much hope in the Google basket. It was a massive unearned win in user count. That was just as easily lost. And kept people from focusing on the core service. Yes Google was never a good steward. Corporations never are. But the lack of official clients and servers, plus their decision to persue IETF standardization had as big or bigger impact on the services development and adoption.
The moral of the story isn’t that Google or anyone else can kill an open source project. Microsoft Google and many more have tried and failed. The moral is that we shouldn’t cater to them or give them special treatment. They aren’t the key to success.
Both are open protocols for communication over the Internet. Both have been adopted by a large corporate interest.
Now, how are they different?
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
It’s not about pulling the plug. It’s about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it’s going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they’ve never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
So basically, the worst thing Meta could do is what the defederators are actively campaigning for: To make it impossible for Threads and the Fediverse to communicate.
Embrace, extend, destroy is a thing though.
It is
I’m not sure if defederating is the correct counter to it
Defederating from known-bad-actor corporations during the “embrace” phase seems like a perfectly wise choice to me. Keeps them from getting to stage 2.
If you federate with something too massive though it has undue weight on the entire system. It is likely to be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish again, and it’s reasonable to want to avoid that.
For people who don’t remember, the pattern would be something like:
It depends whether 2 actually succeeds at pulling users in. Arguably most people already on the Fediverse are unlikely to jump ship to Facebook, but you have to consider what happens in a few years if it’s grown, but Facebook is a huge name which makes people less likely to join other instances.
Utterly idiotic.
Facebook has for 20 years proven time and time again that it cannot be trusted and it is not beneficial for Internet users.
Yet still dumbarse cry over how mean we are to not want them here.
Get this through your fucking head people, Facebook does not have your best intentions at heart. You exist in this space purely for them to exploit. And they will find a way to do so here because that is their whole existence as a company.
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I think the fear is that this turns into an “embrace, extend, extinguish”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I don’t know if the fear is well rooted, but I can definitely understand how Facebook is perceived as not having established a history of trust.
They are a private company, which have placed profits above the best interests of its users.
Edit: I think you can draw a parallel with another scenario: an open and free market requires regulation. There should be rules and boundaries, such that a true free and open market exists. Similarly, there’s an argument to be made than we should restrict the fediverse for it to keep existing in the way we want it to.
Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
Users are more aware of the risk now. “Oh you should go use Google Talk, it’s an open standard” is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, “you should use Threads, it’s an open standard” would be absurd. The value here is “you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it’s a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users”.
It’s important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft’s tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google’s javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.
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Forgive me for repeating this, but I think it’s a great analogy and explains all of our thoughts about it:
I’ve used this analogy before, but threads is like a huge, 5k passenger cruise ship docking in a small town in Alaska. You don’t have to know ahead of time that the 2 public bathrooms, one at the general store and the other at McDonalds, aren’t going to be enough. You can also forecast the complaining about how everything isn’t really tourist ready. It will suck for everyone. The small museum will be overrun and damaged, the people will be treated like dirt. It’s an easy forecast.
Here’s the important bit, just because they’ve never been in the cruise line business, doesn’t mean you have to give them a chance to ruin your town.
Thank you, someone finally looking big picture. I see a lot of folks talking about things like “it won’t harm Threads” or “the federation is all about inclusiveness and joining together” and those people, while correct on paper, are missing the point.
Put simply, many instances would prefer not to deal with that unnatural influx, and that is their choice. In fact, the best part of the fediverse is not only that they CAN make that choice it’s that they can UNDO it later if need be. I can’t fault some of these smaller instances for being proactive in protecting themselves when few here really know what goes into running and moderating.
Threads wants to join the fediverse to either steal the content and/or kill it, there would be no other reasons.
Yes. My personal guess is that they want to start Threads as just another Federation instance where people build communities and relationships across instances as they do already, and act like a good Fediverse instance, all friendly and open and free . . . and then once there’s enough popularity and/or cross-traffic they will wall off the Threads portion and monetize access, so you’re forced to either pay up to continue in the parts you like and are invested in, or walk away leaving everything you put into it to Meta and paying users.
Oh, and they’ll suck up as much Fediverse data as they can too, while they’re at it: anything they have access to will be hoovered up for their commercial use, just as it is now. Federating means that all federated traffic will be propagated to Meta servers in due course, and we all know Meta has zero intention of being bound by any agreements in regard to the data of others, regardless of what platitudes they mouth.
On a personal level, I don’t give a shit whether lemmy.world federates with Threads, but only because I have already made the decision personally not to participate in ANYTHING Meta, and that includes here on the Fediverse.
I’m already here because Reddit pulled that same shit, and I walked away then too. I learned my lesson. No way will I knowingly cross that line into personally investing time and attention into what Meta could wall off at any time and monetize without recourse for anyone who does make that mistake.
And I’d rather they not have my data, but it’s not like I’m in any position to stop or prevent it. Best I can do is stay away from all Meta products, apps, trackers, and cookies.
TL;DR: People can do what they want with Threads, federate or don’t, participate or don’t, just know that Meta can and will wall it off at any time and expect participants to pay in some way to continue.
People seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about why Threads is adding ActivityPub support. It’s not to destroy the fediverse. The fediverse is not in competition with Threads.
Have you looked into the process of actually spinning up your own Mastodon instance? It’s not exactly the good old days of throwing together a LAMP box and installing PHPBB on it.
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If this wasnt needed we wouldnt even think about doing it.