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Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: "Block Threads to Remain Listed"
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this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Technology
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Federating with Threads only hurts Meta. It does not help them in any way. You are not doing them any favors. If you are concerned about reports of genocide attributed to Meta, then you should federate.
Users who create accounts on Threads because they actually want to communicate with people they've heard of helps Meta. Defederating helps Meta.
I would argue that federating with either of the biggest companies on the fediverse is a monumentally bad idea.
Not just because of "Reports of genocide" or anything specious like that; which can be debated for days and days on end by people in both good and bad faith; but because both Threads and Meta are simply too large to be moderated correctly and be capable of managing basic issues such as harrassment and extended bouts of hate-speech which should never be considered acceptable; even if you do not necessarily agree with all of the goals and policies of the Fedi Garden; as strict as they are.
With that being said; I do fully support an Instance's choice to federate, not federate or even limit their federation with them.
In most cases this should not affect instances; but unfortunately there are people who will ignore all warnings and use the Fedi Garden as a whitelist instead of a list of instances that you know will handle policy violations quickly.
On the other hand I absolutely also respect the needs of communities who ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY WILL NOT TOLERATE instances who choose to federate with either X, Threads, or any other instance they deem to be too toxic to play nicely. As instance operators you absolutely have the right to block problems BEFORE they happen, and if you happen to KNOW an instance will absolutely be a HEADACHE, you have every right to say NO. If the users do not like your decision; they are free to find a better instance for themselves; or spin up an alt account on a better instance.
Or just personally block Threads...
What other company are you referring to?
They're not. Meta is simply not motivated to implement proper moderation.
That being said, I acknowledge and agree that moderation is poor, which is, once again, why you should federate. To let people know they don't need Meta. To show them how to escape the exploitation and harassment.
The Fediverse will likely not be much different in terms of moderation, should it ever become even a fraction of the size.
Hi @FfaerieOxide. Beehaw has one rule: Be(e) Nice. This kind of personal attack isn't really in the spirit of Beehaw, and I'd like to ask you to please reconsider how you interact with users on this instance. You can disagree with someone without being insulting or demeaning.
You're gonna have to break this down for me, because I'm not seeing the logic.
So I'm a Threads user. I now start seeing Beehaw posts in my feed. Let's say that I'm seeing them alongside Threads-originating posts containing "exploitation and harassment". How does my seeing those Beehaw posts in Threads automatically translate to thinking, "I should leave Threads and join- not Beehaw, which is federated, but another, non-federated instance"?
Or are you advocating for individuals in non-Threads Fediverse instances to do some kind of manual outreach campaign?
That's not how it works. What you see is conversations on other ad-free spy-free platforms that give you actual control over what appears in your feed, while simultaneously giving you access to all the people and orgs you know and love on Meta.
I doubt Threads is supporting communities so you probably won't stumble across Lemmy convos, much like you don't stumble across them on Mastodon.
You won't know any of those are ad-free or spy-free (which is not true anyways, fediverse instances are absolutely being scraped), or know you could control those if you left Threads.
All you'll know is, "I like this (Beehaw) thing I'm seeing in Threads, so to see more of it, I should use Threads more.
Because Google is so expensive?
Scraping public data is entirely different from collecting your contact history, location history, web browsing traffic, decrypting SnapChat traffic, etc. etc. and on and on.
Fediverse instances can also do most of this. They know your IP and email, and the stuff you reveal about yourself. You could de-anonymize many users with those 2 plus the info they share about themselves on here, with a bit of OSINT work. Any fediverse apps could also get access to contacts or other locally-stored info on your phone.
"But I wouldn't use that app." Well then you wouldn't be someone using Facebook either. People using Facebook would also be the people granting shady fediverse apps undue permissions.
Do you have reason to believe any of that is happening?
Bruh your Facebook username is literally your first and last name. Same goes for most people on most platforms. I don't particularly care about anonymity.
I've never used a Fediverse app that asked for any of that. They have no use for it.
You don't seem to understand the myriad of data that Facebook collects unnecessarily and without user consent. Do a search for Facebook Pixels or shadow profiles. They were just caught decrypting traffic from SnapChat. Most Fediverse servers are far too small to even bother with collecting and selling that sort of data.
The two are not even remotely comparable.
I'm not arguing they're comparable; I'm the one out of the 2 of us arguing not to have any interaction with Meta apps, including via federation. I'm arguing that you shouldn't be trying to sell a false sense of anonymity with fediverse instances. You said they're "spy-free", not "far less intrusive than Facebook". The latter is true. The former is not.
I never did that.
And I stand by that. Collecting necessary information for operation is not the same thing as spying.
May I direct you to Embrace Extend Extinguish. It's happened before, and you're a fool if you think Meta isn't federating specifically to go this route.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Can you explain how defederating prevents Meta from extending open standards (ActivityPub) with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage Threads competitors?
The reason embracing works is because it creates connections between people using the system and allows them to piggyback off of other services.
At the moment, the wider fediverse may not have a ton of people, but the quality of content blows mainstream social media out of the water. By making it available through Threads, new users are going to be encouraged to follow their normal pattern of gravitating toward the big thing while still having access to this content. If we post on servers federated with Threads, every piece of content we add is a boon for Meta for absolutely free. The fact that they have deep pockets means they already have independent federation beat on the server end in terms of stability and long-term reliability. It makes a lot of sense for the average user to just grab a Threads account and not worry too much about which other instances have the odd hiccup or potentially stop existing.
On the other hand, if people exposed to the fediverse keep hearing about all this stuff that isn't on Threads, there's a better chance that they'll get into the decentralized account model that's natural to federation. The logical conclusion quickly becomes making accounts in places that are federated with the places you want to read and post, and if Threads isn't connected to all those places it means it doesn't serve to unify fediverse accounts under a corporate banner.
Threads has a resource advantage, but we have a content advantage. If we let Threads in, the content advantage dissolves, because not only do they gain access to fediverse content, they pollute it.
Thankfully the reality is that the choice will always lie with server owners, not via consensus. As long as the owners of servers with higher-quality content and better moderation don't open the floodgates to Threads, that pocket of high quality content that a Threads account can't have will always exist.
Personally, I suspect the above will be self-perpetuating, as connecting with a larger social media entity will degrade the quality of content. The best bits will always largely be inaccessible to the big sites.
How would blocking yourself from the ability to follow Threads accounts stop them from... anything? It's not two-way if one of the two parties doesn't want it to be, and Meta can't be trusted.
It's two-way. It prevents interactivity between the instances, meaning that Mastodon doesn't get flooded with Threads users and Threads doesn't get access to Mastodon content.
Preventing both of those things is a win for the fediverse, because it preserves its identity and purpose rather than just being 10% of a network controlled mostly by Meta.
Allowing both of these things to happen is a win for Meta, because their users overwhelm the fediverse and they get free content until it no longer exists.
We don't lose anything by staying away from Meta, unless you like really love Facebook and want that to be what the fediverse is reduced to. Unchecked growth isn't a win, it's cancer.
I am thinking along the same lines as you. The fediverse needs to remain free of commercial interests and influences.
We all came here because we were looking for community driven social media, while metavitself has largely killed the modern world's sense of community.
This is a topic that's been covered a hundred times, with intelligent people realizing the "extinguish" doesn't exist.
If Meta decides to stop federating then we are no worse off than we were before they started.
The fact that I haven't had anything equivalent to Pidgin or Trillian installed in over a decade says otherwise. When Facebook became big it literally wiped out the active userbase of 4 concurrently relevant instant messaging platforms.
As far as I can tell they seem to have at this point largely been supplanted by Discord.
And what does it mean that I've never even heard of either of these?
Facebook never interoperated with any of those, or any other platforms, so I'm not sure what your point is.
Exactly.
Facebook messenger literally integrated with XMPP to do exactly what Meta is clearly planning with Threads. They added compatibility in 2010, then scrubbed it in 2015. It's right out of their own playbook. Your assertion is factually incorrect.
XMPP commited suicide when for several years it refused to standardize on file/image transfer, and audio/video calls.
Guess what end-users kept demanding, and kept failing with XMPP.
Like Lemmy EEE-ing Mastodon?
Meta is federating because of EU's DMA laws, and they're going to do the bare minimum to comply with the law... then people will start crying foul because Meta is EEE-ing by not federating 🙄
This is completely false. The entire reason they're federating is to instantly get access to a much larger pool of UGC for their users to interact with. And of course they get to also choose who to federate with and who to block, so they can choose instances that have the kind of content they want, all for free, while suppressing instances they don't like. If your instance starts to try to "convert" people off of Threads, they can (and will) just block you.
Threads has more users than ALL fedi.db-tracked fediverse instances combined (Threads: 160m, Fediverse: 10m). They don't need us for users, they need us for content. Just like Reddit, there are usually a few dedicated 'content generator' users on any given instance, who post the bulk of the UGC. Gaining access to those is Threads' goal. Federating is how they achieve that.
It's absolutely not.
Are you going to explain what UGC means?
The reason they're federating is because of the Digital Markets Act. Same reason WhatsApp is going to interoperate.
Okay, and? What instances do you think they're going to choose and why?
...why would they do that? Why would they introduce something new just to turn around and try to prevent you from using it?
LOL they only need us to comply with regulations. You said it yourself, they have hundreds of millions of users, they don't need more content. And they sure as shit don't need content from users that overwhelmingly hate Meta.
"User-generated content". Posts, comments, uploaded files, etc.
Why would they try to prevent users from migrating away from their service? Are you seriously asking this?
You have asserted this in multiple comments, but the only site I can find asserting this link is a blog post by someone who admits to having only a "surface-level understanding" of DMA, and thinks that this is gaining them data portability.
As someone who works at a very large company that is also affected by DMA, this is not how any company whose legal teams we've spoken with are interpreting this requirement. Data portability is being solved with export standards, so that users can (more) easily migrate to other services. Streaming someone's data over to another platform where they may or may not have an account, or ever intend to go, wouldn't fulfill that requirement, because if the user wishes to move to a non-federated instance, that would not be possible. Portability also cannot be 'favored' under DMA.
That is a separate issue from interoperability, which only works if Threads is allowing federated instances to fully interact with their users' posts, with no loss of functionality, which was at least originally not the plan.
No, that's not what I asked. And you know it's not. That's why you tried to rephrase my question.
Do you work with Meta?
Are you not aware that WhatsApp is also interoperating to comply with DMA? Another Meta company?
Yes, it literally is. You quoted where I said:
And then responded to it by saying:
That is literally asking why they would block instances trying to convert users into fediverse users instead of Threads users.
Do you?
I think you are conflating portability with interoperability. Those are 2 separate requirements.
Portability is about preventing platform lock-in, making it so that users can leave a platform (i.e. Threads), and take their data with them to another platform (any platform, not just ones of the originator's choosing). This is not solved with federation.
Interoperability is the ability for users of one platform to interact with users of another platform, without platform-imposed loss of functionality. Whether ActivityPub can serve as a replacement for an API is something that courts in the EU would have to decide. It is certainly not 1:1.
I would guess he's talking about "user-generated content", given context ("they need us for content").
You don't think allowing people to interact with Meta users while NOT ingesting ads (their virtually sole income stream) or having corporations spy on the entirety of their online presence hurts Meta? You can't imagine how people might realize that they no longer need to use Meta services to follow and interact with the people they actually want to, and that they might leave without losing anything?
I don't think letting people interact with you without leaving Meta hurts Meta, no.
Building something bad actors aren't allowed to access and telling people about it without letting Meta play middleman is how you get people off meta,not throwing open the doors to Evil.
Then why is Meta facilitating it?
I actually expect it matters fairly little to Meta either way, it's basically just a fun add-on to their service, but it's good for federation as a concept.
Most likely to comply with the Digital Markets Act. Same reason they're adding interoperability to WhatsApp.
Wow, nobody had brought that up to me before. It looks like it has been around long enough that could actually be the consideration, the DMA having begun the process of becoming law in 2020.