It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] admin team
took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their
transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it’s users
will not be allowed to proceed. We strongly encourage other instance...
I suppose Metas history of actively being a bad actor working against societies best interests and enabling hate groups doesn't qualify as 'something'...
Oh damn guess I will migrate to lemmy.ml and use that until I find out if lemmy.world defederates or not.
(Edit turns out it is run by tankies and they are federated with lemmygrad.) While I may or may not stay on lemmy.world depending on if we federate with meta or not. I will no longer suggest Lemmy.ml.
What exact behaviors are they looking for that would cause them to push the block button?
Threads can do very well for themselves without the fediverse as they are already demonstrating. What real motive do they have to join the fediverse except to shut it down?
This is not particularly surprising. Lemmy was started as an anti-corporate project by leftists after /r/chapotraphouse got quarantined and later banned (subreddit for the most popular podcast and most donated patreon at the time), with the explicit goal of preventing corporate control from being able to silence leftists when they're blasting off. CTH was skyrocketing in subscribers at the time it was quarantined on August 8th 2019, and when even quarantining didn't stop its growth or slow down its activity afterwards Reddit pulled the plug under the excuse it promoted violence, but the only particularly edgy thing ever said there was "slave owners should be killed" and support for John Brown. This evolved post-ban into the assessment that Spez banned it because he wants to own slaves.
When that happened there was a massive shift in the leftist parts of reddit as we very quickly realised we'd be targeted if reddit ever deemed us to be too successful, and projects like Lemmy began in reaction. CTH's community in fact moved to Lemmy 3 years ago, and resides on Hexbear.net but has not yet joined the rest of federated lemmy due to technical issues (it used to be a fork with a different front end).
Given lemmy's specific anti-corporate origins seeing Lemmy.ml do this should surprise nobody. It's the correct move anyway.
Always love to hear the deep lore. Lemmy’s early development makes a lot more sense now. Good on them(you) to leave everything open and learn from Reddit’s mistakes.
Still, free and open has a limit. No Facebook and no Nazis. That’s just common sense everyone used to have.
Naw that was way sooner, over on the_donald. That subreddit also got banned at the same time as CTH but had been dead for months by that point because they all moved to [DONOTVISIT]thedonald . win(now a virus site) followed by patriots.win. It was basically their way of softening the CTH shit and trying to make it less of an obvious attack on the leftist (non liberal) spaces of reddit. Nobody fell for it.
Mate I do not give a flying fuck what any of these people with zero power are. I care about actually achieving shit. Fortunately I live in the UK where this bizarre sectarianism has absolutely no presence, thank fuck for that.
My point here is that you've got to get a grip. We don't do this bizarre shit over in the UK because there's literally no point, there is no communist revolution just around the corner, the conditions do not exist for it. What matters is what we can achieve RIGHT NOW, when a revolution is actually on the cards then we can decide what that revolution should actually fucking look like. In the meantime these people are all mild lukewarm elected MPs as socdems that just want to give people more welfare and improve basic living standards, but you would call them evil tankies for any of these things.
If you don't build at least SOME power now you will have absolutely none when the conditions deteriorate enough for a real revolution, and if that is the case it will be fascism that wins, not any sect of the absolutely non-existent left in your country.
What you're viewing above is how radical you need to be just to establish and maintain lukewarm european welfare and social safety nets. Get that into your head and you might actually stop the aussie government dumping migrants into concentration camps and help improve people's lives for fuck's sake. You should know better than this anyway, half the union leadership of australia are marxist-leninists, and the other half are trots. What union are you in? I'll tell you whether you need to throw your union leader under the bus for some fucking do-nothing liberal because of your sectarianism obsession. Are you even in one?
Back when I was a kid and got my first computer, I was mostly offline except for the occasional dial-up session. I didn't have much to do on the internet anyway and it was quite expensive. I remember being amazed the first time I have set up to meet a friend over ICQ, rather than a phone call, of being able to communicate with other computers from mine. It didn't matter whether these computers were at a neighbors' house, a different city or entirely different country. I was looking forward to the internet giving us ways to connect like never before. No barriers, just directly communicating and bridging cultural differences and whatnot. Little did I knew that this was just one phase, as the internet gets more and more segregated. Rather than connecting with people, it gives you the ability to filter out whatever you don't agree with, while staying connected with those who share your beliefs. It's like we are no longer living the same reality and can't even agree over fundamental things. I miss the old naive days of the internet when we feared viruses and the occasional pedophile in a chat room. Nowadays it's the possibility of spreading misinformation that could overthrow a government. Either having it going uncontrolled and unregulated, or having a private company in control of such power.
Personally, I think that this should be the choice of an individual user rather than the platform.
I am proud of Lemmy.ml for defederating. The second I find out if kbin social or lemmy world defederate or not I will just move to the other one since I use both.
(Edit turns out Lemmy.ml is run by Tankies and also allows federation with lemmygrad.)
Exactly. This is why federation is cool. The individual can choose where to go. Oh, kbin and lemmy.world, you didn't defederate from the corporate shills? OK then, I shall defederate myself from you. Plenty of instances.
Tankies is a word that better suits them imo. I consider myself a socialist, but those guy are fucking defending the CCP (chinese comunist party) and are very trigger happy with the banning switch. So yeah, i dont think this is a win but more like bussines as usual.
Lemm.ee is another big-ish general purpose instance that looks to be in favour of preemptively defederating after some polling and discussion there today, in case Kbin.social and lemmy.world continue to stay silent.
I will have to check that out. I tried lemmy.ml but found out it is run by tankies. So I deleted my account there. Lemmy.world are trying a wait and see approach which I think is a bit naive giving metas reputation. But at least they are against Tankies. As for kbin.social I have given the dev the benifit of a doubt since it is one person who works hard on kbin and most likely has not had time to comment on meta. I have faith that he will do the right thing and defederate from meta.
I don't really think federating with them is doomsday, tbh (though I go back and forth on this one), but that doesn't affect my primary reason for my nope. Threads consolidates everything I hate about corporate social media--and for that matter, all social media--without a single part I actually liked and made dealing with the other parts worth it. This is not a twitter clone; it's like someone asked chatGPT to create a social media network based on twitter for other chatGPT bots to talk to each other. For fuck's sake, it doesn't think its users should control what they see on their own feed.
I am perfectly willing--even eager--to perform melodramatically about things that annoy me in public for fun and when I'm bored and applaud others doing the same; it's fun times for all and possibly my favorite thing ever. This is not that.
Threads makes my skin crawl on concept. This is not 'they do not align with our values' because come on, Fediverse contains a multitude of values and invents more and i bet if asked, everyone here would list off a different set of values they believe encompass Fediverse and now I'm tempted to see because it would be hilarious. But we can't even get that far; Threads has no values. This would be a marriage of convenience to a real doll fueled by Facebook's algorithms and sponsored by Wal-Mart; whether or not it's a danger to Fediverse shouldn't even have come up because the first question that should be on anyone's minds is 'wait, this is actually a serious question?' and have been answered 'lol of course it's a joke, I just forgot to add the /s'.
I've actually just asked that in another post, because I am kind of interested in what people see as Fediverse main idea.
But, thanks for this summary of how Threads looks like, since I'm avoiding it like a plague. You seriously can't even select what content you see? Fuck, that's way worse than I though - that's so obviously a ML model manipulating with people without holding anything back. I hope they've at least done something with the misalingment where it seems to just radicalize people to keep them on the platform, because if not, the world is fucked.
Fortunately I have never had instagram and have a policy of never, ever using my wallet name online except as needed (exception: usenet my first year online; I was young and reckless). LinkedIn and Facebook were quite literally because a.) grandparents and other family, b.) my job, and c.) I realized early on that I needed an official web presence under my real name because there would be questions if there wasn't something out there.
So I made an instagram account then made a threads account, got a friend who had it to follow me, and did a quick dive.
I mean, it's literally a minimalist twitter real doll; I deactivated to keep my name intact, logged out, and deleted instagram and Threads on the phone in under five minutes and took a shower because I never realized the uncanny valley applied to an app's aesthetic. It's just--I mean, no. No no no.
Trust me, they've taken any knowledge their new ex Twitter employees had about radicalizing people to keep them on the platform and integrated it fully.
Yeah, exactly. I don't have Facebook, Instagram, etc. because I hate them as an online experience. I'm here because it's not that kind of experience. If the fediverse turns into the type of experience meta imposes on its users, I would just have to hope that something else alternative that I like pops up.
Out of curiosity I tried it for a few minutes yesterday. All I saw was a bunch of influencers and low level memes. I had duck duck go tracker blocker on just to see how bad they are and it's worse than I could ever imagine. It showed 686 tracker attempts from 35 different companies and I was only on for about 10 minutes.
I think defederating from them is a no-brainer for the fediverse, but who am I? Just a user of the fediverse. I do not own an instance. I choose the fediverse over meta and its facebook crap, so for me it's a no-brainer. For owners of instances, maybe it isn't such an easy decision. It costs money to run an instance, for example. Federating with the Facebook corporate goons at first will seem useful to some instances, especially the big ones that want to stay big and general. When the big and general ones that fall for Meta's scheme to take control of things, the smaller instances on the fediverse that chose to defederate will be there to join.
I've been thinking on that and assuming fosstodon and lemmy.world both agree to defederate with Threads, I'm going to go ahead and set up regular donations. I only use DW a few times a year, but I renew my premium membership every six months and it's not cheap. I want to keep supporting it because its model does not include ads at all (premium gives you lots of icons, too, and I used to be a huge icon person, so I can't say that's not a consideration). Unless I lose my job or something, I'll keep paying until death or dw closes whether I ever use it again; it's worth supporting.
I was already considering it--when i joined mastodon I bought their stickers to show my appreciation--but this is been a wake-up call. If lemmy.world decides to federate, I mean, I'm not going to leave, but I am going to email lemmy.ml about why my application is still pending and use that for my primary.
It's not about Zuckerberg, it's about the userbase. With something that grew to 30 million users literally overnight, it's impossible to determine what it will be like, and how it will mesh with the existing fediverse content/users.
With something this scale, it only makes sense to secure and observe - pre-emptively block, watch the content, maybe even poll the users on what should be done. There is nothing to be lost this way, it's only a cautious approach towards a potential later link.
What could be lost is the Threads community overwhelms the lemmy community before there is a chance to react (it is 1000x bigger, after all). It makes sense to be cautious, here.
This isn't inconveniencing anyone, any user can make an account on Threads as well and use both right now.
If I wanted to see facebook shit I would use facebook, I stopped using whatsapp when it was bought by facebook, I don't want to see their content overwhelming the fediverse, that's why I'm here instead of there.
Fun thoughts and all but that isn't the reason why they're blocking it. It's because Facebook is bad. Corporation, big, embrace, expand, extinguish, evil. Plenty of explanations around about why these blocks happened. However you're also right. If it were very small like a 15k people instance and it didn't carry corporations inside maybe they'd consider not blocking.
I don't think threads actually has 30 million users. They have some paid shills, probably a lot of their own bots, some people who legit joined to see what it was about, and a bunch of Instagram users who had accounts created automatically. I'm not positive about the last point but if you can't delete threads without deleting Instagram then I'm sure they're going to leverage their Instagram userbase as much as possible here.
I'm not concerned how many of these are real users - all the shills, the bots, are even worse than real users as they will just be spewing their propaganda around as much as possible.
Adding ONE million users overnight to the fediverse would be disruptive enough, 10x the biggest day from the influx from reddit. We're looking at orders of magnitude more than that.
Look, Mark has royally screwed up Facebook. Any respect or honor with the guy has long been lost. Why even give him a second chance when it's obvious he's going to do the same thing with Threads?
His Metaverse failed.
His Facebook/Meta thing failed.
He is a huge red alert to be involved or close to the very things we're trying to recover and escape to from things he has contaminated. Why chance associating with him?
Ideologically, de-federating an instance just because you don't like the guy running it would be a bad thing, but Facebook/Meta has been just so toxic to the internet as a whole it's hard to really find fault with it.
Ideologically, I find more fault in inviting meta to the playground than locking them out. They are the very definition of an evil corporation and no good can come of it.
Pragmatically, twitter style system requires a large networked userbase to be useful for most of the population, otherwise people are tooting into the void in mastodon. So even if I have to work with some soulless corporations to get there I think it's a net positive. For lemmy i don't think threads matters much.
That is very true, but I have a little more trust in this random dude’s server where he gets access to what? He sees my IP address? Than a corp that collects an unnecessary amount of user info for the sole purpose of keeping you locked into their apps with little disregard for health. While also pimping your info out to any persons with $2 to their name.
Which is why we should federate. People have the choice to use a low availability “private” server hosted by amateurs on lemmy or use something secure and distributed that works 100%.
A little warning: the site owners on lemmy could be doing many malicious things. The simplest is the ability to drop trackers in the sites header section. However they could have dns based trackers that are invisible to end users. And thats just tracking so far. The only reason we know facebook is a slime bag is years and years of leaks.
Agreed. Ruud has done a lot of great things for .world in its short time, but I don't agree with his decision on this... I do hope he changes his mind.
There's no need to "give Meta a chance," they've already demonstrated who they are time and again. And I don't want to end up having to leave .world in the future because the traditional Fediverse split in two, and .world is on the wrong side of it.
I don't know. I would like to subscribe to someone on Threads from Mastodon (since both are Twitter alternatives), if they don't have Mastodon account (which let's be honest they probably don't). Zuck does not get any of my data (besides what's available publicly anyway). If Threads decides to go full EEE, I'll stop getting updates from people on Threads, same as I don't get updates from people on IG right now. I think proliferation of ActivityPub protocol would be the greatest advantage.
Moreover, I think we should follow the email architecture - I might use i.e. Proton Mail, but it does not prevent me from sending emails to Gmail, which I think is a bad provider, who collects a lot of user data. In fact if Proton Mail forbade sending email to Gmail I would be really displeased about that.
The goal is to allow people to choose where they want to go and ActivityPub is what can help with that, unlike blocking Threads.
I couldn’t agree more. Racing to block Threads when it’s completely unclear if Threads will even actually ever federate and what the implications of them federating will even be seems incredibly short sighted. Imagine how much innovation would have been lost on the internet if web server admins raced to block Google Chrome from accessing their content because they have some personal beef with Google.
i ONLY want to conter your argument with email and activityhub: on email people choose to send stuff to a very limited amount of people except maybe newsletter and scammers. with threads, which should have already multiple times of osers compared to the fediverse, will flood the content to /all. Of course there are cool people but i think the entire fediverse culture will be blown away by threads in an instand. And with their weird moderation (especcially small) servers here will have large problems trying to moderate it
but by email there is no mass broadcasting to the public so it does not need to be moderated
Email is not only 1:(small N). Maillists do exist and and are used to facilitate discussions between a large amount of people via email. They are also often public so anonymous readers and search indexers can use them.
/all is certainly an interesting thing - default Active sorting calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time. If Threads are connected they would dominate /all. But there can certainly be adjustments, we can create a new sorting style, and make it default. For example:
Posts are deprioritized based on MAU or some similar metric. The larger the MAU, the lower the post is ranked assuming the same engagement. If the post got 100 upvotes on an instance with 1000 users, it's probably a much more interesting post, than the post that got 100 upvotes on an instance with 100 000 000 users.
Posts are (de)prioritized based on instance source. For example setting Threads to -1000 would effectively remove it, setting Threads to -50 would allow you to see only super active posts. On the other hand if we want to see more content from less populated instance we might set it (i.e. german lemmy feddit.de) to the score of 100.
Instances can provide a limited number or percentage of /all - i.e. after we got 10 posts from Threads, stop getting posts from this instance.
As I understand it, and I probably don't, you can subscribe, you just won't see anything from threads except what's re-shared, or you've subscribed to.
You may see things from other instances your instance has federated with.
They'll be devastated when they find out my closed instance with 2 users, 1 of which is inactive, also pre-emptively de-federated them. I shudder to think they'll ever recover.
Very good news. Between Pi Hole and uBlock Origin, any links to threads is already blocked on my computer. Nice to see you folks preventing the linking to this privacy invading boil of the internet
When companies like META show you how ruinous they are the first dozen times, over and over without end, you believe them, and you defend yourself, or you deserve every bad thing that's going to happen to you, when they repeat their corporate driven ends at your expense
"Oh, man..who would've thought that the people who want to monetize everything and dominate any market they get into would not just be our friends this time?"
I'm on the fence here. Luckily, at least, I think community/subreddit-based sites like Lemmy/Reddit don't have "network effects" that are as "sticky" as Mastodon/Twitter, because with Lemmy/Reddit you don't need to build up a follower list to start getting value. You just join the community and it's as if you immediately "followed" a bunch of people who share your interests. You don't even need to make an account - you can just bookmark a community and lurk, and maybe you eventually make an account to start interacting. It's a great "on-ramp" - very low barrier to entry/usefulness.
I think that's why Lemmy was able to take off so fast. It relies on community-level coordination, rather than every individual user having to make their own choice to switch, and try to get all their followers/followees to switch. So even if Meta did add a community-style mode, I don't think it'd eat into the Lemmy userbase. It is hard to be sure though, and I respect the choices of those instances that have blocked/defederated.
Mastodon admins have a harder decision to make I think - there's an opportunity to get very quick growth by effectively adding a lot more followable users/content. A bunch of people don't like Meta/Facebook, but want to follow their friends, and so they may use Mastodon to do that, which could get a lot more people to move to "real" fediverse apps/sites like Mastodon. I know a lot of people that are on Threads now, and I'm looking forward to being able to follow them from Mastodon, rather than being forced to get Threads to keep up to date with what they're working on.
Neat, that means I can stay with lemm.ee for now. It’s a really well working instance and the admin seems to know his stuff. I’d still have migrated in a heartbeat if it federated with meta.
There we go. Not the wishy washy mastodon non-announcement. Although I understand their "neutrality" too, it's still like they wanna seem like the big boys. Sometimes it's advantageous to be small. This "fuck you" may be just adorable to Zuck, but it's also genuine.
(Apparently) Unpopular Opinion: I think defederating Threads is the wrong move, because it just locks people into Threads. If people on Twitter had the ability to move to Mastodon AND still interact with all the people they did before, I think we would have seen even more people move. The only reason I still check twitter at all is because I have a few close friends who didn't move. Meta is likely going to have big adoption of people who aren't ready to go to Mastodon, but are interested in getting out of the dumpster-on-fire that twitter seems to continue to be. But blocking those people from being able to join the more popular Lemmy instances, given no actual policy violations, just will keep people in Meta that otherwise could leave. With the "however" being: It's not quite clear to me that Threads users will be interacting with Lemmy as much Mastodon, if Threads were a Reddit replacement, it's more directly connected.
Uh, wouldnt this make more sense for mastodon instances to defed? Can we even see mastodon posts on lemmy? I know they can post here, but its always like a lost in translation weird post.
I don't generally judge people based on their appearance, but this man's face gives me the heebie-jeebies. There's something alienating about the lack of affect he seems to have, plus his features seem to be an approximation of a human face - the mouth is too small, the ears too big, the forehead too shiny...
You shouldn't be. These companies are not here to play along, but dominate. Just like reddit played along with 3rd party developers until it didn't need them anymore, so will Meta use the openess of the protocol to ultimately undermine it.
How does that work? Is threads using a protocol compatible to lemmy?
(And I fully agree with the preemptive blocking of any facebook stuff).
Edit: thanks for all the detailled answers.
So Facebook tries the old EEE - Embrace Extend Extinguish.
1.A big company is Embracing an open source standard ("we're friendly, see?) They get a lot of users that way - even the open source savvy types.
2.they start Extending that standard "to make it even better" - but not talking about these changes with the rest of the community first. They cannot react quickly enough and become incompatible with the new version of this standard.
3.Extinguish. When all the users are effectively using the big companies platform with something that isn't the original standard anymore they change it so much that it isn't compatible at all anymore or replace it completely.
They can always make an account that federates with Threads, or make a Threads acccount, or host their own Instance and be their own lord of the manor. You choose that here.
This complaint doesn't work. "Noones treading on you, sweetie."
You don't wait and see how it goes with these sorts of things. They will destroy the community before you can take action and it'll be too late. They will do their best to destroy the fediverse and privatize it. They can't buy it like they usually do with competition, so they'll ooze their way in, contribute bullshit to the project, create new proprietary functionality that only works on their instance, convince everyone all the other instances are broken, and walk away with all the users. You don't invite vampires into your house.
Do you realize that fediverse is not one single project? For example Lemmy and Mastodon has different implementation and developers. The only thing that connecting them is ActivityPub, which is owned by W3C, not the community.
So basically Meta created their own implementation for Threads (so it's already propertiary), and theoretically already able to pressure W3C to change the ActivityPub without even joining fediverse
How will they destroy it if they are literally only making it larger and more useable. The average normie today has no reason to create a mastadon account, because almost no one uses it. But if they can use a major social media platform, and use a federated free service like mastadon, then that makes mastadon much more valuable to them.
The fact that a social media service is objectively good doesn't mean anyone is going to use it. Having backing from the biggest social media company in the world, might actually get people to use it.
Not sure what to think of this honestly. Like imagine a small email provider decided to block Gmail, that's a death sentence. It's impossible to get people to switch apps when they have to leave behind all of the content and people they used an app to interact with. And let's be honest, threads is going to run at a loss for a long time to grow their userbase before they start pulling weird shit. We need to have a migration path when that happens, and if threads is blocked everywhere, people will lose their content and contacts upon switching, so they won't do it.
I don't really get this. I see people were worried about Threads app/web app permissions (which I signed up and no permissions were granted immediately beyond notifications). Regardless, wouldn't staying federated with threads.net allow everyone to interact with them all from the more reasonably permissioned app of their choice, like Jerboa?
It's more like just in case of legal issue. Big corporations tends to declare more than what they actually use in "Data Safety/Privacy" just to say they consent in court. It doesn't mean they collect or use all the things they declared.
So, hear me out... What if we put a scheme in place where anyone who wanted to use the API had to pay for access? And then we charge like 20x what we should to put them out of business. I am sure that would work out well.
Sorry, should have been more clear. Private data, like os, screen resolution, headphones etc.. basically all that shit we saw in that screenshot a few days ago
Yeah, the problem here as I see it is that just the same as Twitter, this social media service is still owned by a single owner corporation who is running the service for a profit and they will eventually sell user data or bastardize the service. Ive been on the internet for 30 years, social media and websites come and go and so does their popularity.
Which raises another point, how are the bills being paid for with any of these services, including lemmy? TAANSTAFL.
I moved here from Reddit my I have 3 boxes to check off before I can commit to a home for social media. A community that rivals Reddit which is tough to do. They are some of the snarkiest bastards alive, decentralized of which Lenny gets kinda right, but ultimately someone owns this server, and that’s pretty centralized, and open source to avoid social media for profit. I haven’t found one out probably 69, or so that I’ve tried. If someone were to check all those boxes they’d eventually blow the top off of social media.
Oh shit you're right. I could have sworn I saw they used their own protocol "similar to activitypub" but looking at their site it sure as shit is activitypub. Thanks
While the title may be clever, Threads is an Instagram creation, not one of Facebook, and while both are products of Meta, Facebook content (and even Instagram content) and Lemmy content would never co-mingle.
Instagram has been owned by facebook/meta for 80% of it's existence. The concern isn't that Facebook or Instagram content would show up on lemmy/mastodon.
why would you move from twitter, it is truly a more open forum now, dont care what views you have free speech should be the same for every one. people have thin skin and that just leaves them naturally as targets.
Generally disagree. If you want the Fediverse to become a large open standard, if not the largest, then this is going to just be a matter of course. Companies will seek to commodify all their offerings, whether they use open standards or not. Many exist that commodify on top of open-source software and open standards. The important part is to ACHEIVE the open standard to begin with, and I think it's short-sighted to pre-emptively block something that could be a strong item down that path, and before it might show itself to be more harmful towards that goal.
It can always be blocked later, situation-depending.
But here's the thing: do you really want the Facebook crowd in the Fediverse? You've probably been to any facebook comment section of any facebook publication, and it's cancer. One thing I liked about reddit before its fuckups, is that it was not facebook (or twitter for that matter).
So, screw facebook. I'm quite okay with instances blocking that noise.
I disagree with the prevailing sentiment here. Meta using ActivityPub is going to help ActivityPub grow an will be good for federated platforms like lemmy, and mastadon.
Lemmy should not block threads.net. Individual users can simply opt out of using threads, but it's good if we can communicate with people using it and they can communicate with us using a decentralized, free, standard.
I mean maybe, but I can't help to feel a little like this is optimistic speculation, while I've read very well-written arguments for blocking threads.net that seem less (albeit still) speculative. I just don't want to lose what we have, and if we really want to keep growing then we can do so without Meta.
and if we really want to keep growing then we can do so without Meta.
No we cannot. This website is barely usable. The average person doesn't want to use lemmy. They want to hear what their favorite musicians and athletes are up to. They want to use a service that has a massive user base so they can learn new things from experts in various niche fields, etc. They don't want to go to a website with 1000 people who all share the same unpopular political views.
By joining with threads, we make it easier for this average person to switch over to lemmy or mastadon. There is literally no downside to federating with them. They can't shut down smaller instances.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is the fear. Other companies have done it with other open standards, it's a fantastic way for corporations to kill decentralized solutions.
Proprietary/centralized ones just get bought out early on before they capture a large market share. Activitypub has 15 million users on it now, and since it's not a single company that Meta can buy out, they need an alternative approach to destroy it.
What is the threat? Isn't it good that the fediverse is becoming more mainstream? If thread users can communicate with us, it will be easier for them to join us.
It's only my personal point of view, but have you ever seen how does a Meta user usually communicates? Can you imagine a moderating an instance where you suddenly get an influx of 3 billion users? None of them will ever create an account outside of the Meta ecosystem, and will only bring problems to most of the other instances, while making any kind of moderation a living hell.
The threat mainly is a corporation looking to assert itself within the fediverse in an attempt to kill it's growth with eventual incompatibilities. Personally, I don't have a dog in this fight, but it's been interesting to watch.
Don't see why people are doing this. You'll just damage the fediverse and discourage meta from federating, granting them their own walled garden that you cannot use without selling your soul to them, which is going to dissuade people from using Mastodon as what's the point if people on threads cannot see what they have
Would you mind explaining how they're going to do this with fediverse? Like explain using your own words and not just linking that same article everyone is spreading around. It seems like no one is cabable of giving ELI5 or even ELI15 answer to this.
You're posting on public forum. If you don't want Facebook to see it then stop posting. Defederating isn't going to change that. It just stops the content flow from their instance into yours. Not the other way around. For them to get data other than your content and upvotes you need to install Threads app because that's only available to the admins of your instance and Facebook can't get it wether you federate with them or not.
People are demanding for defederation but almost everyone is confused about what it does.
I get that. But instead on Lemmy were freely giving away our data to literally anyone that ask for it. That's the downside of the federated platforms. I guess with the fediverse you're at least not tying things to your actual identity. Not sure if threads allows for anonymous accounts like Twitter.
You don't speak for everyone, especially when you clearly don't have a clue what you're talking about.
The comments and ratios in this thread are a perfect example of why lemmy.world should not defederate from facebook until given a clear reason. You all are operating on emotion, not logical or rational thought.
Embrace: You're selling lemonade at your stand. One day, another kid in the street ("Kid B") starts his own lemonade stand as well. Noticing his operation, you decide to become friends with him and share your lemonade recipes with him, so you both can make tasty lemonade together.
Extend: As you continue to share more insights and tips about your business, Kid B starts implementing your strategies. His lemonade stand begins to seem a lot like yours. You suggest adding exciting new features to the lemonade stands, like special umbrellas, or a particular secret ingredient that only you know. Since Kid B doesn't know any better, he relies on your inputs and makes these changes.
Extinguish: Now, both lemonade stands are almost identical. You've influenced Kid B's business heavily, and it's become deeply dependent on your ideas. At this stage, you make a move that Kid B can't match. Maybe you start selling a unique lemonade flavor that only you can make, or setup a cool sign that Kid B can't afford. Suddenly, customers start to ignore Kid B's stand and flock to yours, because yours has something extra or special. Eventually, Kid B's stand can't compete, and he has to close up his lemonade stand.
This is a simplified example of how "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" can work.
Accounts can be on instances which are federated with Threads, and on instances which are defederated from Threads. A single person can have both types of accounts.
Defederation has effects which many users find desirable. The same suite of effects is not available on a user level, and would require each user to manually take action individually.
So from a feature perspective, it is necessary that some instances defederate. This provides better service for users who find it desirable.
There will also be instances who federate. People can use accounts there if they prefer that.
TL;DR: We don't need a consensus. Instances can choose their federation policy. People can choose which instance(s) they use.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand the point in defederating. Aren't you just cutting down on the amount of content you can see? As a user I'd personally prefer to pick and choose what I can see.
What's the actual upside in doing it? Obviously I can see why you'd want defederating from say a far right instance, but in general it seems like only downsides.
I'm new to all this so maybe I'm missing a crucial bit of information.