For anyone wondering if Threads and Facebook at large will be a fine neighbor in the space and compatible with other apps/services in the fediverse: they’re already automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed https://mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807
Repeat after me: I will not federate with any Meta products.
I will not federate with any meta products.
I will not federate with any meta products.
I will not federate with any meta products.
I will not federate with any meta products
I will not federate with any meta products
I will not federate with any meta products
I will not federate with any meta products
I will not mederate with any Feta products.
I’m kind of stupid and more here just because it tends to be better discussion than Reddit: what does “federate with” mean in this context??
Thanks!
@Minotaur @henfredemars @technology You are using an account on lemm.ee to reply to someone commenting from an account on infosec.pub in a community hosted on lemmy.world.
Those are all running Lemmy software, but I am replying from an account on social.goodanser.com, which is running Mastodon software.
That’s federation. We’re all using different service providers, sometimes even different software, but we can talk to each other because they speak the same protocol, called ActivityPub. Threads.net has announced plans to support ActivityPub and conducted some limited trials, which they’re in the process of expanding. They claim they intend to support it fully, but only for users who opt in to it.
Servers can block, or “defederate from” other servers, and many have chosen to preemptively defederate from Threads.
Very interesting. Appreciate the response. Didn’t know big companies like meta had any interest in the whole “federation” gig, seeing that it seems a little “opposed” to the kind of big revenue that supports tech companies like that
And now I’m commenting from a lemmy.world account because Lemmy from Mastodon has some rough edges like the need to tag the community in my comment above to ensure it actually reaches the lemmy.world server.
Tumblr and Flickr are also talking about ActivityPub support, but it’s not clear if or when that will actually happen. It would make more sense to me for those services since they’re fairly small and it’s a way to substantially increase the possible audience. It’s not clear what Meta’s motivations are here, though a motivation some have proposed is that they’re trying to get in front of potential regulation. The EU Digital Markets Act, for example requires some services to interoperate with competitors, and having one of its new products join an established standard protocol is a way to say “you don’t need to regulate us, we already do the thing”.
I don’t think their blocking of comments mentioning Pixelfed is intentional. Pixelfed is not popular enough for Meta to care about as a competitor, and blocking mentions of competitors has never been among their tactics.
Youtube was blocking comments mentioning Fediverse and ActivityPub 2 years ago way before all the exposure the Fediverse got last year. Facebook was blocking links to mastodon instances also before all that. There is absolutely no way a very specific word such as Pixelfed would be blocked “accidentally”, how do you propose such accidental block would even be possible? Oops, intern smashed his butt against a keyboard and set a filter that happened to catch Pixelfed by accident? Come on.
Appreciate this response, it seems to make a lot of sense to me.
I think people on sites like Lemmy and similar can kind of uhh… overestimate how much anyone outside of a very niche crowd care about the whole “federalization” movement, and yeah it seems unlikely to me that Threads is going out of its way to shadowban a (comparatively) niche competitor like Pixelfed
I’m about 99% sure Threads uses automated spam/abuse filtering based on uncommon words present in posts that have recently been flagged as abusive. Somebody, perhaps several somebodies probably posted “follow my porn account on Pixelfed” or similar that Threads doesn’t like. I’d use something like that if I was making a huge social media thing because you can’t not at that scale.
That’s exactly why Threads is incompatible with the Fediverse. Any huge server that is impossible to moderate for admins is detrimental to the network and failure to properly moderate is the number one reason we should be looking at to defederate from instances.
Automatic “spam” protection is the exact thing which co-opted e-mail. Big corps with the largest e-mail user base use algorithms that automatically assume the worst about any small e-mail server. If you spin up a small server you are assumed to be spam unless unless unless, which ended up with e-mail being centralized in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple, despite being theoretically decentralized too.
Is that what we want for the Fediverse? 4 or 5 huge instances automatically defederating from all small instances unless they fit some criteria defined by the big corps, which they can change anytime?
You need more training in corporate risk management, grasshopper! AP/AtProto isn’t a revenue opportunity, it’s a potential front for which they’ll need to have a battle-ready product and brand. Ever heard the saying ‘engagement is containment’?
But it actually isn’t, because the largest driver of growth for platforms like facebook & instagram is the already present userbase.
That userbase will always be there if the programs are all federated together, so creating a new platform is now just making a better site versus that and bringing in the userbase.
Wait did I miss something big? Does Lemmy now federate with Mastodon somehow? How does that work?
@LibertyLizard @technology It always has. They both speak ActivityPub.
The UX can be awkward though. As an example, I had to add the community tag to this comment manually, as it won’t federate to lemmy.world otherwise. That’s because Mastodon doesn’t push replies to every server with users participating in a thread, which I think is a design flaw.
To post to Lemmy from Mastodon, just tag a community. You can load any of the fediverse links shown in the default Lemmy web UI in a Mastodon search box and reply to them. You can also follow a community and receive every subsequent post and comment as a boost (this is a bad UX and I don’t recommend it), as well as follow Lemmy users, which you can’t do in Lemmy itself. You cannot vote on Lemmy posts/comments from Mastodon.
I find tagging an appropriate Lemmy community from my Mastodon posts to be a good experience. You’ll see a few of those from my @zaktakespictures account in @birding, and from @zakreviews in @flashlight.
I’m pretty sure Lemmy won’t make new toplevel posts out of this in those communities since it’s a reply, but I’m going to check just to be sure.
Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: !birding@lemmy.world, !flashlight@lemmy.world
Always has. Anything using ActivittPub can interoperate
I was under the impression that it theoretically could but wasn’t set up in a way that made this possible. But perhaps I was mistaken.
How do I access Mastodon content using my account here then?
Threads hasn’t had federation enabled until now, but you’ve always been able to interact with Mastodon… sort of. The Lemmy UI doesn’t really have a good way of finding Mastodon posts that don’t tag a Lemmy community or of following Mastodon users, but if they do tag a community the Mastodon post will show up as a Lemmy post in that community.
I see. So functionally it doesn’t really work, at least in this direction.
You can’t use mastodon from Lemmy, but you can from some threadiverse software like Kbin.
You’ve had some well-meaning but ultimately not quite accurate answers in this thread so just to clarify:
You can follow, post to and interact with Lemmy communities from Mastodon, because they’re treated the same way as a “group” on Mastodon in general.
You can NOT follow and interact with Mastodon users from Lemmy, because Mastodon accounts are individual “users” and Lemmy doesn’t have the concept of following and interacting with users, only with communities. If Lemmy ever does add a feature to let us follow other users, then in theory following Mastodon users will also become possible.
As far as I know it’s always been this way. At least since I joined during the whole reddit fiasco
How do you access Mastodon content in Lemmy?
I didn’t fully understand what I was talking about when I replied, and for that I apologize. Now that I know a little bit more, this is basically how it works (I think):
We cannot see posts made directly on Mastodon. However, they can see posts made on Lemmy and even comment on them. We are able to see those comments as normal and without doing anything on our end, but again, that’s only as long as they’re made under Lemmy posts
It doesn’t work so well in that direction. Lemmy doesn’t have a concept of content that isn’t posted to a community. If a Mastodon post tags a Lemmy community, it’s available as a normal Lemmy post, but otherwise it doesn’t exist.
FWIW I think this is intentional and a feature, not a bug. By spreading content to communities, you can delegate moderation responsibility much easier.
Content not posted to any community would need something akin to a site-wide moderator or an admin to moderate, and such a moderator wouldn’t be as effective. They’d cover a wider array of very different content. Community moderators work better because they can define rules that are only confined to their comm and they know better how to moderate their own community and they also care more about their own community so are more motivated to keep it well-moderated in the fashion they want.
Serious question: how do we - the end users - stop federating with Meta?
Move to an instance that won’t.
Burying your head in the sand doesn’t change the fact that whatever LW does will affect all of Lemmy. They’re too big.
That sounds like a problem for instances federated with Meta. Empathy is cool but they are not our problem.
This is a strange response for me because de-federating is an active step on behalf of its admin, usually after a vote amongst its users, at creating a virtual boundary between the two entities. How is that burying your head in the sand? And yeah, lemmy.world is big, but aside from the obvious loss of content/users, what other effect will that have on the mass of de-federated instances?
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that since LW will federate with them, any content they host, will end up on meta.For example, this discussion we’re having right now is on !technology@lemmy.world. So it doesn’t matter whether our own instances have defederated meta - our posts and comments here will bring them value. Directly, in the form of content. And indirectly, in the form of processable data for machine learning, shadow profiles, etc.but my understanding is that since LW will federate with them, any content they host, will end up on meta
Your understanding is wrong. Instances don’t forward stuff from other instances to other instances. Instances only send their own content directly to the instances they federate with.
Thanks!
So on a different instance that’s not federated with Meta I can see LW content but not Metas?
whatever LW does will affect all of Lemmy
Uuuh no it won’t? The fact that they federate with Threads doesn’t mean that my instance does. How does it affect me?
You posted this to a LW community, so your content and data will end up in Meta’s hands as well.No, that’s not how federation works. My instance sends my content directly to everything my instance federates with. No instance takes content from other instances and sends it further - that is not a thing. I sent my content to lemmy.world and it is free to be there. Lemmy.world will not forward that to Threads.
Migrate away from instances that embrace Meta to those that do not. Choose an instance that aligns with you.
Or in the extreme case, if you’re the first who can’t find such an instance and you’re technically inclined, there’s your room for a new instance. It’s how the fediverse works and partly why Meta is so intent on destroying it.
How does one find a list of instances that aren’t federated with meta?
I don’t know,but you can check individual instances by going to the/instancessubdomain and searching for threads.shjw and blahaj are defederated, world isn’t.
This can always change, but I have confidence in my admins.Edit: Thanks to Canyon201@lemmy.world for this link
Replied in another comment, but here is is again. https://fedipact.veganism.social/
What’s the difference between blocked and fedipact?
The tooltip for fedipact says: “Agreed to block all communications (their blocklist is private)”
To me that says, they’ve agreed but it’s not confirmed that they’ve gone through with it because the blocklist is private. Blocked on the other hand says “All communications are blocked”
Thanks! I was on mobile and couldn’t see the tooltip
I think fedipact actually sign the pack to block and the others just blocked.
Thanks for this. Looking to make an account on a better server now
Appreciate the link! Glad to see that both my mastodon and lemmy instances have already blocked their content.
EDIT: removed comment due to outdated and inaccurate information.
Not sure anyone posted this in direct reply to you - https://fedipact.veganism.social/
You can search/filter for your instance there. As an example, if you search lemmy.world you’ll see they currently do federate with meta.
after me: I will not federate with any Meta products.
mEtA wOnT dEsTrOy ThE fEdIvErSe. wE sHoUlD lEt tHrEaDs In
Let’s just give them a chance guys. They haven’t done anything bad yet. It will help the fediverse grow. We need their content
wE cAn AlwAyS dEfeDeraTe lAtEr. It dEfinIteLy WoN’T bE tOo LaTe tHeN
Yeah because that’s an opinion people have
Buddy, search for Threads related posts from a few months back. This was seriously in question.
It still is. I think more folks percentage-wise are OK now than were then. Had the argument just yesterday. I’m not seeing nearly enough pitchforks, and it worries me.
Oh no, it was everywhere, and I got into some decent arguments with those lovely people who ask you to show them how it’s going to have any effect on the fediverse at all, complete with citations.
WeLl hOw Do YoU KnOw?
All anyone has to do is log in to their gmail or fucken m365 email and you’ll see the future of corporate federation. Its “the same thing”.
You can search for threads and literally see these comments yourself buddy
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Had that argument yesterday. It IS an opinion people have.
I was one of those people that said “let’s see if they will be acceptable neighbors” and well, it seems we have an answer.
If it’s true then I now favor defederation.
Edit: it sounds like this wasn’t true.
I was one of those people that said “let’s see if they will be acceptable neighbors”
Despite how it may sound, I mean this in a non-snarky way. Are you aware of their history as a company?
Yeah I mean who could’ve seen something like this coming?
After so many positive experiences with the charming and wholesome company Meta, now this completely out of the blue…
It’s not just true, there’s a history of this mentioned in the replies to the original masto comment. Pixelfed is a direct competitor/alternative to instagram and meta’s has a pretty clear policy of not giving it any airtime on their platforms.
Why, well they dominate the instagram style platform space (and I’d guess it’s their biggest platform ATM and most prospective going forward). Twitter-style platforms are new for them and introduce monopoly issues … so they toy with the fediverse to allay potential issues.
I think all of the schmoozing the likes of Evan, Gargron etc are doing with meta (they have active accounts on Threads AFAIU, for instance) will reveal their true colours (techbro growth mindset just the hipster way) and leave them with egg on their face.
For sure they saw dollar signs down to road for them when Meta decided to create threads.
how Dare that remote instance moderate the content coming into them. hole shit, lets shut down all instances that do that!
If there are any instances or comms that don’t let you mention alternatives, then yes definitely shut them down
so fediverse instances must adhere to some global moderation, or else? sounds an awful lot like a walled garden.
you sound exactly like what you hate
One of the cool things about the fediverse is that you are free to run your own instance with whatever rules you do or don’t want, and tell the rest of us to fuck right off.
Some instances will defederate from you depending on what those rules are, like those specific relatives we all avoid if we can at holidays, and ignore the rest of the year. They are also free to do so.
IOW, folks might tell your instance (or Meta’s) to fuck right off.
That’s what freedom looks like. It’s not supposed to be just your freedom, it’s supposed to be everyone’s freedom.
Edit: And by the way, I’m very surprised if a company scrubbing mentions of competitors from its platform isn’t a solid anti-trust violation.
exactly! each instance can do its own thing. so its very strange to see people shitting on meta for doing exactly that.
federate/defederate i dont care, but this hate-boner everyone gets from the idea of meta on the 'verse is childish.
each instance can do its own thing. so its very strange to see people shitting on meta for doing exactly that.
You mean scrubbing mentions of a competitor from their platform? That’s not OK, and it’s an indicator of their future behavior that is very consistent with their past behavior.
this hate-boner everyone gets from the idea of meta on the 'verse is childish.
You are entitled to your opinion. (And so are the folks you think are being childish.)
Nobody is saying to shut down any instance, only that we, and others on the platform who think likewise, would like to not have to see those instances. Nobody is saying to shut down Truth Social or Pawoo or Baraag, for instance, despite having severe disagreements with those instances - we just decided, on our instances, not to federated with them. You aren’t obligated to agree with us - you can make your own instance with your own rules, as others have said, or switch to an instance accommodating to your beliefs. But at the same time, it doesn’t mean the rest of us have to listen. Think of defederation like blocking - I’m sure you have some sort of block list for trolls, spammers and bots. Same thing, but for an instance.
I have to post this again sorry
I remember you from the Reddit post!
Highly unlikely. I dont post on reddit
Hahaha the post ABOUT Reddit. Posting the same image. Sorry, when I reread my comment, it comes off absolutely NOT how I intended!
Ah. Ok.
is lemmy.world federated with threads?
Yes. You can check who is here https://fedipact.veganism.social.
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Well, for non-German speaking europeans it makes sense, last time I checked .world was the only decently-sized English-speaking server in my area.
EDIT: well, apparently that’s no longer the case, good to be wrong I guess
decently-sized
Why does this matter? You can see everything on lemmy.world even if you come from a small instance. Size is not necessarily a benefit here.
A small instance has a higher probability of the owner stopping maintaining it. Obviously this doesn’t apply if the instance is yours, but I’m not tech-savvy enough to do that.
True, that’s fair. But I’d still join a small server to give it a chance and to keep them afloat. Small servers would maybe stay around more if more people joined :)
You actually raise a good point: People may not join a smaller instance if you’re not confident it’s going to hang around.
I might see if I can publish a contingency/continuity plan in our next community update.
Lemm.ee still shows up as “private” in the Observer, but I don’t know how I missed .ml being in France (I really doubt they somehow “ moved” the server). Checking again you’re right though, the situation got a lot better over time.
mastodon.art blocked 5,805 Admin: Fuck off, Zuck
K. That’s my top choice if I relocate.
Kind of a drama lightning rod. Fair warning.
The CEO has openly welcomed Threads, saying it’ll make mastodon “more attractive”, so I’d maybe rethink that decision.
The what?
I am stunned that so many instances think federation with Threads is a good idea.
So what’s fedipacked mean?
Aussizone is the pink heart
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Ironically I wouldn’t have heard of it if it werent for this, so Streisand effect in action.
wouldn’t have
it’s almost as if a company that helped incite an ethnic cleansing just a few years ago, hosts far right stochastic terrorists like libs of tiktok (despite the owner repeatedly breaking meta’s own rules) and actively suppressed the voices of Palestinians and posts that criticised Israel doesn’t make for a good instance to federate with.
it was immensely irresponsible for any instance to federate with them, let alone the largest one.
Im surprised no one has copy pasted libs of tiktok posts with info of mark zuckerberg, elon, etc to see if that breaks TOS and yell free speech and right wing censorship if the accounts are taken down
But surely meta has good intentions and we should totally trust them guys!!1!
Big corporations coming to tge fediverse will be epic 420 69! I like my tech, not because how it improves my life, but because HYPE! /s
Seriously, they were blocking mention of competition (pixelfed) on threads before they launched their first attempt at federation.
Why is everyone so opposed to
cancerThreads coming to the Fediverse?
Does this mean that if we always mention
pixelfedor@pixelfedwe can effectively block Meta from leveraging our contributions to the Fediverse?… Or you know, just go to an instance that defederates from Threads if you don’t want you content there?
Some of us are not savy and don’t know how to do that.
your instance is already defederated from threads
Thank you! I thought it was but then I have been seeing toots from instances that I’m not supposed to be able to see (or so I thought) so I wasn’t so sure I understood the whole thing anymore. Also, I don’t understand the difference between defederated and fedipact 😬
Fedipact is people who’ve signed some thing pledging to never federate with threads, whereas all the other ones have just defederated them without signing the pact. In reality there’s not really any difference at all.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply! I apologize for having a “knot in my brain” about this. I have now had the time to read most of this whole exchange and understand better. Also I realized that what was confusing me was not on a Lemmy server. I was under the impression that the fedipact meant that my other server (Neuro different.me) will not federate with thread but will also defederate from servers who federate with Thread. But that doesn’t seem to be the case so what I don’t understand now is: if my server defederated Thread but remains federated with a server that didn’t defederate Thread… My data could still land on a Thread server?
If my server defederated Thread but remains federated with a server that didn’t defederate Thread… My data could still land on a Thread server?
if your instance defeds threads then it blocks any information being sent to threads at all so they wont receive anything that you post, not even your upvotes on posts will federate with threads.
The only case where this gets kind of weird is if you’re on an instance that federates via an allow list of approved instances instead of using the normal method of federating with everyone by default then blocking selected bad instances (the only large instance that uses this method for federation though is hexbear as far as im aware so its not really that important).
Zuck Fuckerberg.
We can’t federate with something that’s completely against our ideia of “social”. I mean, meta wants a monopoly of the public space. Meta is a shopping center, the Federation ( Mastodon, Lemmy, and stuff) should be like a public square.
“We can’t federate” is not really an option… Sure, every instance can add threads to the blocked list. But to keep big corporations out of ‘our public square’ ActivityPub would have to be twisted into a grotesque version of itself.
What makes you say that? Why is defederation not good enough?
Small businesses can individually refuse to do business with the big shopping mall -> add threads to the block list (‘defederate’ them)
The big shopping mall is not allowed to put their building at the public square -> threads is not allowed to use ActivityPub
The first statement is totally ok and a lot of instances do this. However, similar like shopping malls it can pose a challenge for small businesses to stay competitive, while categorically refusing business with the big actor. The second statement would require the towns construction committee to not give the shopping mall a license to build. However, this construction committee is a centralised power and not in the design of ActivityPub.
I do not like threads and see them as a potential threat to what we have here. Exactly because it could become harder to stay competitive while refusing them. But i don’t see much that we can actively do.
Thanks, that added some good context to your position. I think it’s a legitimate worry but I think we have a chance, unlike the shopping mall scenario.
I thought @dansup already committed to blocking federation with Meta. Why does he care if they’re shutting him out, too?
People make more complex decisions when they have multiple roles:
- As admin of pixelfed.social, dansup may have decided it is best for that community not to federate with Threads, at least at first
- As the lead developer of the Pixelfed software, he probably doesn’t like anyone censoring discussion of his software
- As an individual with an interest in social media, he has a Threads account and is participating in conversations there; he would probably like to be able to talk about the projects he’s working on
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What a weak thing for such a big company to do. Censor the mention of an open source competitor that almost no one uses.
It’s like combat, companies like this see it as necessary to take every protective step possible, they have an inferior product so manipulation is the only way to maintain their monopoly
If something is not on the radar it doesn’t exists. That’s why MSM doesn’t want to talk about some topics.
I think it’s a lot more common than most people would realize. Capitalism hates talking about things that let’s normal people do things for free.
That’s why we as regular people need to spread the word as effectively as possible.
What’s a pixelfed?
I didn’t know either so I looked it up for you.
Hey, that actually looks neat!
I barely take any pictures, but I agree with you.
If I am not mistaken, it’s an open source Instagram alternative.
Ah I see. I am now suitably enraged.
(/s I hate Meta vehemently of course)
In my experience it’s like Instagram but with no one to follow or to react to your posts.
