A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.
However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don’t have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.
What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it’d be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.
What actions can we take to deal with Threads?
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Ignore it. Defederate. Defederate with any instances that chose to federate with it. Keep the fediverse small and independent. It’s nice here, let’s keep it nice.
I keep asking but haven’t gotten an answer, why must instances that block meta also block those that federate with META? Wouldn’t blocking META be enough, as you wouldn’t see their posta, nor users, nor comments in any way after blovking the domain?
Is this punitive or is yhere a reason I’m mising?
In a federated system, users on Alice can see and post into communities hosted on Bob, eg alice/c/funplace@bob. When Meta tries to join, Alice chooses not to federate - avoid giving meta free content, protect its users from ‘bad’ meta communities, preemptively block toxic meta users, whatever - but Bob does federate. Alice users can’t see meta/c/advertising, there’s no way to subscribe to Alice/c/advertising@meta. Both Alice and Meta users can see Bob/c/funplace, and so alice users can see anything that meta users post there and meta ‘gets’ any content that alice users contribute. Bob effectively acts like a tunnel between alice and meta users.
I got the impression that somehow your activity 3rd hand can still be passed on via the intermediary instance to Threads, and then becomes part of their dataset. I could be wrong, I’m not sure how that information gets passed on in the backend.
If you are worried about your data falling into the hands of Meta, don’t worry, they already have it. Lemmy is incredibly easy to scrape by design.
What we should be more worried about is
- Whether we can become a better and more vibrant community
- Whether we can properly advertise that we don’t track users and don’t have ads
- Whether our instances can be equally performant
This is the only way we can have a steady influx of new users.
Agreed, the data concern is a red herring. Might as well do a “I hereby revoke consent for Facebook to take my data…” post for all the good it will do you.
Block Threads because of the potential impact it can have on the quality of experience here. That’s a good enough reason. Nobody joined a lemmy so that they could keep in touch with people who use social media to gossip about brands and influencers.
Yeap. It doesn’t to go mainstream; it’s already successful.
I was recently asked by my employer if we should move our social media efforts to fediverse and my recommendation was that this community it’s both too small and also would be hostile (rightly) to corporate empty posting.
As soon as threads has a web interface that’s usable I will be starting up there…
You put your recycling in the blue can, compost in the green can and your corporate garbage on Meta.
The whole idea is they should setup their own instance, and try and encourage a community there.
Governments should also setup their own lemmy/mastadon instances as well, use it for PR/interaction.
Just: We absolutely must wall off Meta.
I have already blocked threads on my household instance. I decided that I don’t want to have to trust major instance admins to take the same things seriously that I do.
I’m going to recommend that if W3C starts accepting changes to the AP standard from Meta, the community must maintain a fork that rips out any offending parts.
Join the pact and not just vow but actually do defederate Threads as soon as it comes online: https://fedipact.online/
Why?
There is literally a link on that page titled “why”…
I don’t agree with it. Lemmy won’t be affected anyhow since the use-case is so so different. We hardly interact with Mastodon. We’ll be fine.
i appreciate the message but what is that ui design???
the floating hearts that go over the text. the neon pink background. the fact that this serious pact is in all lowercase (i know im typing in all lowercase, but i think the fedipact is different from an internet forum). the weird text animation for hyperlinks that makes it unreadable for a second. this does not lead to any reasonable credibility
Push celebrities, influencers, and businesses to create their own instances, outside of Meta.
If they just use a Threads account, then the Fediverse gets made irrelevant. Along come the Three E’s, and Meta walls up the garden and starts putting billboards up everywhere.
Celebrities, influencers, & businesses need to know that they can now have a social media presence that they own, rather than rent, where they can make the rules for the communities they host. It’s good for them in that it keeps their Fediverse presence theirs, they get to call the shots and choose how their instance is set up.
Because if enough people have a strong Fediverse presence outside of Threads land, it’ll make it much harder for Meta to pull the plug.
I’m doing my part here by promoting “Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
This is my instance now.
“I’m a Barbie girl, and this is MY Barbie world.”
Another vote to defederate here.
threads will never federate.
Make an account and use chatgpt to shit post on it.
Ah, the u/spez r/programming approach. A classic.
Absolutely defederate from threads immediately from anything threads related.
Threads will collect any and all data they can about users disregarding which server you are on, and not agreeing to their business practices.
There’s a reason they are not in the EU, including NI despite being in UK. And that’s probably because their practices are illegal, and don’t respect the rights of their users according to EU regulation.
The second Lemmy federates with Threads, I’m out of here.
Fun fact - GDPR is about European persons, not European servers. If an European citizen has a fediverse account on an American/African/Asian/… server and Meta collects all of their data and processes it, they are still in violation of GDPR. Locking European (Instagram) accounts out of Threads doesn’t make them comply magically with GDPR.
Good luck meta, have fun handling all those GDPR requests and proving that Europeans have consented that you suck up all their data…
But if your company is not localized in EU how they will prosecute the company?
Yeah, that’s a bit of a problem in general. But in this case we’re talking about Meta. It’s one thing, if $randomCompany from outside the EU does it. As long as they’re not doing business within the EU and not specifically target the EU as a market, then they might try to get the company and fine them and may or may not succeed.
Meta on the other hand provides service explicitly for EU citizens & companies. Not only did they localize Facebook, Instagram,… for European languages, they offer the service to sell ads for European companies. In this case, the EU can and will have a way to get them fined, I they want.
Maybe but idk if they cannot just evade it juridically since technically Threads is another company besides being owned by Meta, also they will just ip block EU users. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see Meta being fined, I just cant see this easily happening.
An EU person living in Chicago is protected by EU privacy laws.
IP blocking would only protect Meta from EU persons living in the EU.
Level fines and collect them.
I second this, the NI/RoI/EU situation with threads is proof to me that they are for sure doing threads for only the most shady/coporately greedy reasons.
The fediverse isnt ready for widespread/user adoption. Not everything has to grow exponentially overnight (this is a big problem with modern culture IMO).
Let the fediverse develop naturally and healthily, it will shine on its own in time.
What I do not understand about this take is that they can already collect all of this data, today. They don’t need to federate with the rest of the Fediverse to scrape basically all of the data they want. The only problematic thing they’d need an instance for is linking votes to users - which is something they could do just by spinning up a Lemmy instance. And they probably shouldn’t be able to, Lemmy should try to figure out a way to anonymize votes.
Threads joining the Fediverse does not significantly increase their ability to collect data about existing Fediverse denizens.
I’m going to block it as a user until I find a friendly, stable instance of my favoured Fediverse flavours that blocks it for me.
There’s no persuasive argument I’ve heard for treating Meta as anything other than a rampaging horde of Huns on the attack.
I’m brand new to Lemmy (guess why, lol) and federated systems in general. How do I block all things Meta? And what does that even mean for Lemmy, where it’s an entirely different site from Facebook?
As of now, there’s no built-in means to block entire instances as a user. The only way to keep them out are to use an instance that is 2 levels separated from them, that is an instance that doesn’t federate with another instance that federates with them.
Alright, that kind of answers the “how do I block Meta bullshit?” question, but what does that mean for Lemmy? Lemmy is an entirely different site from Facebook or Threads or whatever. Or is Lemmy more like a browser to view anyone’s federated community? Then I’d get the EEE thing everyone’s talking about. You usually see your communities on Site A, but Site B offers what Site A has, but also free beer! People migrate to Site B, Site B slowly introduces ads, poisons the beer, kills your cat, and steals your wife, but Site A is a shell of it’s former self and dies out, so…you can’t unfuck what’s been fucked.
ActivityPub is the protocol that Lemmy/kbin/Mastodon use, and is the basis behind the fediverse. It’s also the same protocol that Threads uses. They’re all different site/services, but they can all interact with each other through the ActivityPub protocol, assuming they are federated to each other.
At the moment, Threads is entirely separate, as they haven’t federated with anyone, but eventually they will want to join the fediverse, and the question is whether or not to federate with them. They will always be able to view our content as it’s public, but if we federate with them we will see their content and they will be able to post content here. Keep in mind that Lemmy currently has about 70k active users, and that Threads just got 30 million+ sign-ups. We don’t know how many of those are active users, but it’s certainly more than all of Lemmy put together. If they come here, that’s going to be basically impossible to moderate.
Ahh, so if I’m on Site A, I can view and comment on things from Site B, so long as A and B are federated with one another. The worry then is basically seeing and dealing with Meta’s bullshit here, and them more or less taking over through EEE tactics. That makes sense now.
Lemmy communities aren’t federated with Meta threads by default, right? It’s opt in. So just…don’t federate with .meta or whatever they’ll use? Apart from “don’t affiliate with The Zuckerbot”, I’m still not sure what the worry is all about.
Ahh, so if I’m on Site A, I can view and comment on things from Site B, so long as A and B are federated with one another.
There’s a bit more to it, but essentially yes. For example, beehaw.org has defederated from lemmy.world, but we can still view their content. We can interact with their content and reply to their posts, and other instances that they are federated with can see what we do there, but beehaw users can’t see any of it. Basically federation is a one-way street. You can federate with an instance, but they don’t have to federate back.
Apart from “don’t affiliate with The Zuckerbot”, I’m still not sure what the worry is all about.
That’s kind of the motto of the fediverse in general. It’s supposed to be de-centralized and de-corporatized. There are no built-in features for advertising, for example. It’s meant to be a place that is safe from the things that we’re afraid Facebook is trying to do. Overall, it mostly is. They can attract people out of the fediverse and into their garden which they plan to wall off, but they can’t quite shut down the independant instances.
Ahhh, now it makes sense, thank you! So…do we panic because Zillaberg is making a federated Twitter sequel, or…?
In my opinion, the people that use Instagram and will potentially use Threads aren’t the ones who will get into the Fediverse.
They will probably not even know that this exists in the app as it just puts you directly in threads.net.
Also, there’s the option that this is just a ‘trend thing’ that will die in a week or two, probably because people won’t get used to or due to legal problems (as it’s already happening).
Edit: typo.
Same could be said about fediverse in general. I thought there would be more action against reddit but seems the majority of people don’t care.
I dropped Instagram for Pixelfed a week or two ago. It’s a small community, but friendly and nobody is trying to sell me anything lol.
It’s a clear EEE attack. Do not federate!
I agree. If I want to see “VIPs”, influencers, ads or other crap like that I can still register an account over there. Also Meta’s track record is horrible…
Sorry, but I’m a bit out of the loop, what is an EEE attack? When I look it up all I get is eastern equine encephalitis, which I somehow doubt is related.
Thanks!
Exactly, Threads will use the Fediverse to seed content and then start to drift from the standard when they have sufficient user base that they don’t need the outside content. They will start to shift all communities to be Meta-hosted and stop advertising the others. Eventually they will just disconnect entirely.
we shouldn’t do anything.
Isn’t the whole promise of the fediverse that whatever the policies of one instance are, that doesn’t necessarily affect all the other instances, and each can do their own thing. If an instance doesn’t want to accept traffic from threads, good for them. But to try to organize a fediverse-wide response to threads seems a whole lot like the centralization the fediverse is supposed to not be.
Well the resistance isn’t without reason:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I’d like to add to this that there’s no particular benefit to defederating preemptively instead of defederating in response to a problem.
Also, is this a problem we need to deal with? I think it matters for Mastodon instances, but I don’t think Threads users will be interacting with Lemmy.
Agree, by design the fediverse should be able to resist whatever the supposed harm is from META, I don’t really agree with privacy concerns since everything on the fediverse is public, especially on kbin and lemmy, almost everything is already available to whomever eants it, there is no need to set up this hugr machination since they can already accomplish it so much easier.
