Hi everyone, I’m one of the administrators of the Lemmy feddit.it instance - my nick is @poliverso@poliverso@feddit.it
Together with our fellow administrators, based on some impact assessments, we have decided not to operate any preventative block against Threads, but I am not aware that we are still federated. I noticed that your instance is federated to Threads instead, but I don’t understand how this was possible. The strange thing is that, from your instance, it is still not possible to view those dozen Threads accounts that are currently “federable”. So I wanted to ask you: is there a way to force federation?
Thanks in advance for your feedback, sorry for the inconvenience and best wishes for a happy holiday!
I honestly don’t want to be federated with Threads or any social media giant. I really enjoy the organic discussion and lack of advertisements in fediverse compared to a strong amount of paint by numbers discourse/ads ads ads on the standard social media
I agree. Thats why threads is blocked on my instance. I can only encourage peeps who really like lemmy to make their own private instances (maybe for a handful close friends) and add resilience and diversity to the fediverse. There even is some kind of easy deployment script now afaik.
Yep but I don’t really think small instances work well just yet.
I have a powerful PC (enough RAM, cores, nvme etc on a 1Gb line, 700Mb up) and it’s incredibly slow most of the time, because I guess, there are not many users forcing the federation.
I’m working on some band-aid scripts to half-fix that until Lemmy catches up, but just so you know it’s not perfect for small communities yet it seems.
We‘re having very opposite experiences then. Setting up a private instance wasn‘t crazy easy or anything but if it works, it mostly works well. Also, lemmy doesnt need a fast pc. A thread or two and half a gig of ram should suffice. The reason for it being slow could be either bad connection, too much downtime (not running 24/7), configuration error or old version (prior to 0.19.3 there were federation errors).
So I‘m pretty sure setting up your own has no downsides in terms of performance, absolutely not related to pc performance in any way. The only thing is knowledge required since both setting up and running can come with curveballs.
What problems are you experiencing exactly? Maybe I can help.
Thanks for the feedback!
I had some massive problems with the first 0.19, which eventually was fixed but 0.19.3 just was so slow (and only had “minor fixes” IIRC) so after the painful time of the broken federation I reverted to 0.19.2 just because it “worked”. Maybe I should try the 0.19.3 again.
I do have a beefy PC with a good connection and it runs 24/24 so I’ll definitely try out the latest version (again).
Cheers
Here is the post where I was told to upgrade since 0.19.2 didnt work too well. https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/post/216846
Also, it might be a good idea to remember that the 0 as first digit means lemmy is far from „ready“ for general use, just to manage expectations.
Upgraded and it works well it seems, thank you!!
Awesome! Love to hear it. I‘m still having months old posts pop up from the time I havent had 0.19.3 so maybe you will see that too but otherwise it should be working. Feel free to update further down the line.
Threads isnt really federated yet. They have enabled an opt in federation for some accounts on threads like the CEOs account but its not like mastodon etc that have instances that are federated
It looks like Twitter users are explicitly paying to access the Fediverse using servers like @bird.makup.
God likes voluntary suffering
It is odd that threads.net appears on our instances page, while the same is not true for other Lemmy instances which have not blocked Threads. Lemmy.world is federated with Threads by default simply because it is not on our instance block list. I do not believe our instance has done anything special to force a link with Threads. I mentioned it in our admin chat and will update this post if I learn anything.
However, even with threads.net listed on our instances page, Threads does not seem to work with Lemmy. I am able to search and view Mastodon user profiles from lemmy.world, but it does not work for any of the Threads test profiles.
Edit: The lemmy.world database has no records for a
personon threads.net. Our best guess is that a Threads user tried to interact with lemmy.world. Perhaps the process got far enough for our instance to recognize threads.net and add it to our instances list, but not far enough to create a record of the user in our DB.Now I understand: I thought that federating Threads was a deliberate choice, but it was probably an incidental phenomenon simply due to the large numbers managed by your instance.
Probably one of the ten Instagram executives who have a federated profile has tried to search for one of your contents. Or he found the message of a followed user who participated in one of your threads in his Timeline. Or they are simply experimenting with your instance…😁
I said the wrong thing here. Excuse me
In any case, there is at least one other Lemmy instance, probably for the same reason: it is an instance that handles quite large numbers anyway:~~https://sh.itjust.works/instances~~EDIT: no it is not true: https://lemmy.world/comment/7949266
sh.itjust.works explicitly blocks Threads. They held a vote among the local users: https://sh.itjust.works/post/11308397
Um… that’s not what it looks like from the relevant page: https://sh.itjust.works/instances
It’s in the “Blocked Instances” section, where it should be.
You’re right, sorry 🤦♂️ 🙇♂️ : the federated instance was threads.ruin.io, not threads.net
Federation should hapen automaticly when a user subscribes to content on another instance.
Yes, but I can’t “find” Threads content from Lemmy.world
I think it might happen just from doing a search for the content using the right terms / string?
You cannot view microblog posts from Lemmy, so the only way you’ll see anything from Threads is if a user from there responds to content posted to Lemmy or similar sites. Possibly also if they choose to tag a community in their post, but that seems unlikely for anything else than testing purposes.
Same as Mastodon users, really.
A quick look through the source code suggests that any attempt to interact with or by another instance creates a database entry for it, which makes it show up at /instances. Someone could have tried to view a threads account from lemmy.world, or someone at Threads may have tried to view a lemmy.world post, user, or community from within Threads for testing.
fwiw, it does not appear to be triggerable from within lemmy at this time.
I’ve just tried this on another instance and lemmy complains
The webfinger object did not contain any link to an activitypub item
I suspect this currently can only be triggered from threads.
I’m not a fan of this either.
I understand your choices well. We have made an internal evaluation on the opportunity to federate Threads with our instances: with the mastodon poliversity.it instance we decided to silence Threads; with the Friendica poliverso.org instance we used the newly introduced functionality to obfuscate all the personal data of our users towards Threads; with the Lemmy feddit.it instance, however, we decided to leave the federation to try to allow Italian Threads users (feddit.it is an Italian-speaking instance) to use activitypub groups and discover the “free Fediverse”
Great example of how there isn’t any one right answer here, it’s different for different instances. Can I quote this in the “What will instances do? Opinions differ!” section of https://privacy.thenexus.today/should-the-fediverse-welcome-surveillance-capitalism ?
👍🏼
Thanks! Here’s how it looks:
Thanks for the mention. This is a very interesting and informative page for all users of the fediverse
I agree with this. We should leave the door open to Threads users that may not know the Fediverse.
We can always de-federate later if Threads misbehaves.
Yes, I think so too, but it is a choice that is up to the administrators because it can have dramatic repercussions on the maintenance of the server
I thought the point of federation is that you cannot force an instance to federate with any other activity pub app or service? I’m very happy to be wrong.
In reality, any user can force federation by simply searching for the handle of a user or content of the fedeverse from the search box of their instance. This method always works unless the instance has been previously defederated.
The problem is that from feddit.it I can’t “find” the contents of Threads (and not even from lemmy.world), even when they are those of the ten Instagram executives visible from mastodon.social and from any other instance that has not defederated Threads
In reality, any user can force federation by simply searching for the handle of a user or content of the fedeverse from the search box of their instance. This method always works unless the instance has been previously federated.
That’s not quite true. That won’t bypass explicit defederation at the instance level, and authorised fetch can stop it from working at the individual block level too.
