Open link in next tab
Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-activitypub-test-mastodon
Threads has begun connecting to the fediverse.
Couldn’t just some of y’all defed instead of blocking it wholesale for everyone?
I thought one of the main perks of federation was user choice?
Well, that's what has always been mentioned, defederated from them, AFAIK there's no way of blocking it completely from the fediverse, so if your instance's admin wants they can decide to not block them and you can interact with meta.
If your instance defederates and you want to still see their activity then you can choose an instance which is still federated with them.
The annoying thing is that some people demand to defederate from instances that don't defederate
•
This place is growing just fine already, we don’t need to dump 141 million new accounts into it overnight.
That's not how federation and mastodon works, and you know that very well.
Simply don't follow anyone on threads if you don't wanna see thread content. But who TF cares where the content comes from?
Embrace, extend, extinguish. They'll play nice with the Fediverse for a while. Maybe years. But then they'll introduce a new feature to the Fediverse as a "good will gesture". Then they'll make features available to only people federated with Threads. Then they'll make features only people on Threads can see. And so on and so forth. We SHOULD care where the content comes from. Platforms that are neutral should be where our content comes from.
You're just describing how the fediverse works. One social network that is partially comparable with another network. Like subscribing to pixelated from mastodon, etc. not all features are available, but some are. Not only is there no such thing as a neutral platform, but the decentralization of mastodon and the fediverse in general is specifically to address that.
The danger of meta is their data scraping - something they can already do anyway without their own servers being federated.
Why? Why are humans who use threads so repulsive to you that you leave an entire federated social network just because some people used a particular server?
I suspect lemm.ee will, but not much beyond that. Hell, theyre still fedded with explodingheads and hexbear.
Threads isn't going to federate with Lemmy. It's not the same sort of communication and the crossovers are ugly and confusing. Mastodon is where the real federation/defederation decisions will take place.
I can see a social media implementation of a communities section and feeding off lemmy that way. Essentially cloning reddit through their users and using lemmy communities content as a Kickstarter tool.
Sure, if they clone Reddit then I definitely could see it, though I think Lemmy communities are a much bigger risk for them to open up to since they're so moderation dependent. At least with Mastodon what you see is all based on your follows. Reddit loves to abdicate on responsibility by just leaving it all to the mods, but I don't think Meta can get away with that, and especially when they don't directly control the mods.
The great Mastodon.social itsself would federate they wrote some blogs back when threads anounced activitypub integtation
I feel the only thing I don't see on kbin is 18+ stuff. lol
All the political extreme instances and their users seem to be still there.
Because I don't want Facebook to get my content, nor do I want their content in my feeds. I joined the fediverse to be as far away from corpos (facebook, twitter, youtube) as possible.
Facebook, and literally anyone else, can already get all your content.
It would take all of a second to scrape your user page. Obviously that wouldn't grant your IP address or anything, but neither would federation.
-
Meta is only pushing, not pulling. So if you’re an influential person there is less incentive to create a masto account. Threads content will appear in both places, but Mastodon content will only get exposure with mastodon’s smaller user base.
-
The fear is that the broader Fediverse will get hooked on a flood of Threads content. They have much more daily active users, and as we already know, large instances can easily dominate a feed. And Threads will be gigantic.
To 1:
We're starting with the ability to follow threads users from activitypub clients, but we will get to the ability to follow accounts from activitypub servers on threads as well
If 2. will actually be a problem some instances will defederate, while many users will choose an instance which allows them to follow who they want. I'm all for interoperable social media/messaging, because it gives users the choice.
I'm curious when they'll add inbound federation. It could lead to massive amounts of spam, so they'll probably block instances or inbound traffic quite quickly.
Hopefully it won't end like email, where it's really difficult to start federating to the big providers (Threads). But even then, we'll still be able to choose any of the current instances and continue without them. Edit: It's not a big problem if Threads doesn't show all posts, since other instances will still show them to users who care. Compared to email where a 100% delivery rate is critical (at least for important stuff).
Infinity grow is a mirage. We need to understand that. It's fine if a social media as a limit.
What's important is how you manage to keep it in life. Even here, you have a limit. It's conservative to think that it will last for ever as you will encontre the same issue as with infinite grow.
The fact is that thing appear, have a lifespan and die. Social media aren't immune to it.
Worth noting that Meta through threads currently plans to collect and monetize the data of all users that it federates with.
Capitalists don't care if something is legal or not. Just how much the fine will impact their bottom line. And if anyone can prove it. I 100 percent guarantee you that every major tech company is technically in violation of the GDPR etc. it's just a matter of whether or not it will ever be provable enough to be actionable.
The data is out there. Meta does not need threads to scrape it is the basic thing to take away.
That's actually the most interesting concern I've seen raised about this. I hadn't thought about that. The embrace, extend, extinguish thing is what you see most people raise as a issue.
All your stuff is already public on the internet without any special access being granted. If they want the convenience of receiving ActivityPub packets and metadata, they can just stand up a honeypot instance and some fake accounts. The Fediverse isn't built for privacy.
They don't need ActivityPub for that. Nearly everything on the fediverse is public and scrapable. If they want to monetize fediverse data, they already can
Meta also doesn't need to federate in order to do that, since federation just accesses public data.
In how far? I think it is actually a valid criticism of a very strongly opinionated take.
Meh. Threads is quite busy on my feed. I loved chatting during Doctor Who just like I used to when Twitter was around. I use Lemmy, Mastodon, and Threads, personally. I find Threads to be super wholesome and positive and it can only help the Fediverse thrive with mainstream users much like Gmail did with email.
Gmail did with email.
That might be the worst example you could have chosen, given that Gmail is largely responsible for the current technical impossibility of self hosted email.
Um. I'm not one of those who downvoted you, but are you sure you understand the difference between hosting email, and running a client?
well if you are talking about actually self-hosting a mail server, then gmail didn't prevent that isp's did.
and downvotes mean nothing since my instance doesn't have them.
It had nothing to do with ISPs. Here's a good writeup on the topic
I think most here have come here to avoid big tech companies. Reddit has become bad and beyond the pale. Facebook, and Meta companies are not good for privacy, and many wouldn't like to promote them or have their content building those platforms up. Eventually, you become the thing you hate.
Threads federation is mostly targeted towards Mastodon than Lemmy, so I highly doubt it will make much of a difference whether any Lemmy instance federates or not, since Lemmy is purely group based and does not federate well with even Mastodon to begin with as there is a huge difference in design philosophy. (Which means I can stay under the radar a bit longer.)
However, I don't think Facebook will stop at Threads, they are using Threads as a preliminary test, and if it goes well, I think the next step they could do is to get Instagram itself to federate.
So here is a thought: suppose reddit or Instagram are open to federation, would you say federating with them and getting all their content will be worth it?
Seconded, I'll leave the fediverse if that happens. I want nothing to do with those sociopathic corporations.
And this is why lemmy will never overtake reddit. Literally the satanic panic, because some users might be posting on some other platform.
It's not a competition, quality over quantity. I don't want anything to do with corporate social media, it's a disease.
Except lemmy isn't some "high quality social media". It's the same thing, with users that act the same.
It has much less corporate influence and the user base is self-selecting for people who give a shit enough to seek that out.
Yeah, so? The independent servers / instances will still be here. Worst thing that can happen is it goes back to what it was before.
That's esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress/Lemmy powermod Margot Robbie to you!
RIP open and user owned Internet movement attempt.
Say Hello to Fediverse+, for only $39.99 a month you can access ad free browsing as your feed is fed only corpo approved posts that have flooded and drowned out any alternative voices.
I'm don't totally understand the fediverse and how it works. How does meta making one of their options federated harm the rest of the fediverse?
There is zero benefit to engaging with multi-billion dollar companies.
The harm is they embrace, extend, extinguish the Fediverse and I can easily see the W3C letting them donate and start putting in some features “to protect” the children or media ownership rights or whatever bogus excuse they’ll use to start cracking down on it like every company does every time it gets involved in something.
But then if other instances don't want those features, isn't the worst that can happen that instances just de-federate from Threads? I know the history of EEE, but I don't see how that can even work here.
•
But then if other instances don't want those features
In other words, if other instances don't want to have compatibility with the popular instances -- hence the issue.
That's not really an issue though; or at least, I'm not yet convinced it's one. We're here because we don't want to have compatibility with Reddit, and I'm on Mastodon because I don't want to have compatibility with Twitter.
•
We're here
Are we though? Because it looks like you're on kbin and I'm on slrpnk.
If either one of our instances decides to implement proprietary features that Threads creates (the second E in EEE) and the other one doesn't, that could break the experience of us being "here" together.
And we're free to move to another instance that has the access, or lack thereof, that we want.
More companies is the opposite of beneficial for the Internet.
We need a people oriented Internet.
I should say I'm actively opposed to anyone gaining control of the fediverse but when I started using Lemmy, Masterdon and Peertube, (until about an hour ago) I was unaware that it would be this easy for a big company to just engulf it if they wished to.
If I knew that the fediverse could be controlled and then drained like every other internet community, I would have approached it differently.
•
Has mastodon blocked threads? Please block it. Kill that shit and hope thread will take zuckerberg out too.
•
Mastodon.social admin and lead mastodon dev Eugen Rochko signed an NDA with Facebook and has since been in support of Threads' embrace of the Fediverse and asked people to give Facebook a chance. We won't know if he's made some deal (monetary or otherwise) with Facebook due to aformentioned NDA.
Many instances of the fediverse are anti-Threads despite his shilling though.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Joining the fediverse — the decentralized world of social media that includes Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other services that all interoperate through ActivityPub — has been on the Threads team’s to-do list since the very beginning.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri told The Verge in July that he believed decentralizing the platform was key to making it relevant to a new generation of creators.
Skeptics have long held that Threads would never actually federate, even as Zuckerberg, Mosseri, and others at Meta kept promising they would.
For the largest and most centralized social service on the web, suddenly throwing open the gates to other platforms seemed like an unlikely pivot.
This test appears to only cover one small part of a truly federated social network — it doesn’t sound like you’ll be able to post from Mastodon to Threads, for instance, and you can’t move your account between services.
But the test at least reaffirms Meta’s commitment to ActivityPub and to being part of the broader open social web.
The original article contains 344 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 52%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I'm all for it. People can defederate if they need to, but I'm all for just letting it happen. If I have friends on threads but I don't wanna join, cool.
Let's all tone down the snobbery.
The elitist gatekeeping. Not that "I don't want to see their content" but instead "I want to prevent anyone from seeing their content".
•
It doesn't seem to be snobbery, the concern is more that big corp with money to throw around muscles their way in and changes what the Fediverse is either through EEE, or just by being bigger
That doesn't seem to be the concern, or at least it's expressed in a way that describes how the fediverse is meant to work.