Why are fediverse admins blocking out threads?
Why are fediverse admins blocking out threads?
I get meta evil, but aren’t we just blocking out any users from accessing the wider fediverse?
No - they're blocking out any users from accessing the wider fediverse through threads.
They're entirely welcome to access the fediverse through any of the countless instances that are not owned by grotesquely destructive megacorporations.
If you’re in the know, sure, but if the fediverse interacts with threads we could expose literally billions of people to the larger fediverse.
Maybe while the fediverse is still getting it’s legs defederating is the move, but I mean literally billions of people being made aware of the fediverse would be amazing.
i have never once in all my years seen one single thing made better by being discovered by the masses.
Embrace, extend, extinguish
Meta does not like the fediverse and they will do anything to destroy it
It's not making anyone aware. For all I know, Meta probably wouldn't even show the source instance, just abuse the content
Threads is currently in the first stage of EEE: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Best to stop it now before it goes too far.
From Wikipedia:
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
EEE is overblown (in my opinion). The privacy aspect is a much more pressing concern (again IMO)
Couple reasons actually
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Meta wants to scrap every bit of data, doesn't matter if it's on Threads or networks federated with it
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They just want a free usercount boost for start, and will remove ActivityPub integration when they feel Threads can go on alone
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It's all a classic case of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
and will remove ActivityPub integration when they feel Threads can go on alone
I suspect it's even worse than that: they'll make it one-way only. So from Threads you can follow and interact with Mastodon users, but you won't be able to follow and interact with Threads users.
That way, they can position themselves as the entrypoint to the fediverse without contributing anything back, and lure everyone into Threads. Especially with the ties to Instagram accounts: easiest sign up for the fediverse because lots of people already have Instagram accounts.
Normies will only care about being able to follow external users, not the other way around. They'll be like "well just make a Threads account, that way you get everything".
I was talking about that on Mastodon but what prevent them to scrap on the fediverse when every thing is basically public (except private profile, etc). They could already be scraping data without even being in the fediverse.
The difference is that by defederating the only connection they can make is really just a facade. Users could see our posts but not reply or boost or favorite them. It would be like living with ghosts who cant see or interact with you. Makes for a crap experience.
And it also means that Meta can start sending you DMs or tagging mastodon users to push their ads or agenda. Yeah they can see your data but they can't interact with you.
It's blatantly illegal and Facebook/Meta has probably had enough of EU fines already.
Also, see this article from 2 days ago
Tl;dr:
The case centred on a challenge by Meta after the German cartel office in 2019 ordered the social media giant to stop collecting users' data without their consent, calling the practice an abuse of market power.
Can’t they just scrape the data anyway?
Yes, at least the public posts (not the private ones). I would say that their consistently lacking moderation is a bigger problem, and that’s probably the most important point, even if one doesn’t care about privacy or Embrace Extend Extinguish.
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https://infosec.pub/post/400702
and..
YSK : Meta is a threat to the privacy of fediverse users, if there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta.
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
That infosec post up some good points.
The issue I see is that defederating them doesn’t resolve any of the issues they pointed out. Meta is still able to see most information in the fediverse, their built in user base is so large, that it makes the fediverse look totally empty by comparison. I don’t think we realistically prevent much disinformation by walking them off (though we do prevent some)
I just think it’s such a missed opportunity to grow the fediverse. Like now we’re 100% certain that threads users won’t take part in the larger lemmy communities at all.
EEE is a real thing, but it’s a balance act. You can be embraced and extended without being extinguished as long as you do it carefully (I mean look at some of the open source projects of the past decade. Typescript, bucklescript, react, electron and even companies like GitHub, which M$ owns, but hasn’t been mucking up too badly)
Maybe defederating for now is the right move, so the fediverse has time to grow into its own, but I don’t think “meta evil” is a good enough reason to just block out potentially billions of potential fediverse participants is all.
Letting them be part enables their abuse. Not let them join, protect the fediverse and let's it grow slowly. If you focus on being big quickly, maybe you are right, but if you want to maintain and grow the fediverse for a long time... You are almost certainly wrong.
Facebook can bootstrap their product with federated content made by users who are in the fediverse because they don’t want to support a company like Facebook. By not defederating, you would be helping Facebook every time you post a comment or make a post because you would be giving Facebook free content to further their for-profit goals.
Edit: they will also be taking fediverse content and displaying it next to ads.
See that’s a good point. Facebook is going to get fediverse data regardless of defederating them. Most of this stuff is public anyway.
But displaying fediverse content next to ads w/o consent is kinda gross
Users are free to download Threads and go lick zucc's balls if they so desire, instances are just protecting themselves and the responsability that comes with it.
It's getting tired reading so many zucc apologist, I swear they are bots or accounts created for that purpose
I think ActivityPub's license should prohibit financially profiting from the platform.
EDIT: I mean "should be changed to"
I don’t think it does. ActivityPub is just a specification. The spec itself is under a very permissive license https://www.w3.org/copyright/software-license-2015/
We would be arguably better off educating and convincing these users that they would be better off purely in the fediverse. But good luck with that because I haven't had any success with it.
Is threads Mastadon? or Lemmy? or something else? How does it interact with lemmy? And how can I block it on my server?
Threads is a microblogging platform similar in idea to mastodon, and uses the same activitypub protocol
You can block threads.net (and there's a list on GitHub of every meta domain, if you want to be extreme)
Edit with link to list of all meta domains
Honestly it doesn’t even matter. If meta really cared about fediverse data, they’d set up their own unnamed server, make a bot account that just follows and subscribes to as much as it can. Nobody would know to block it, it’d just look like another user.
It is not about data. It is about EEE. They cannot EEE it without showing their hands.
Threads will immediately be the largest community in the fediverse when they join
As in several times bigger than everyone else combined. Most content and users will be from threads. this has consequences:
- while it will draw more users into the fediverse, nearly all of them will join directly with threads
- users who would have joined other instances will be parasited to threads as the safest best supported option
- whatever threads does, other instances will be forced to copy or risk losing feature parity with the most important player in the space.
- existing users will get accustomed to the content from threads as occupying the dominant super majority of content on the site.
Threads will essentially be the space, with all currently existing communities left as periphery. Which is very bad on it's own because the decentralized space is no longer decentralized, and in fact is in the hands of Meta.
Meta will eventually wall itself off because not having control of your users social graph is an unnecessary threat. And since they are the space, so they will lose very little by walling off. When they do wall off, the fediverse will have it's communities deeply intermingled with Meta, and when people lose most of their friends and content to meta walling themselves off - most are going to choose to relocate to meta.
Slowly growing the decentralized space organically is important to avoid this kind of stuff. If we allow someone to become the hyper-dominant instance, the principle of de-federation ceases to matter because they have so much controlling leverage over the users.
I do still think this is a good thing, but it's a complicated good thing that could do more damage. I am very worried that they aren't starting off federated. That also means their internal community norms will develop isolated from what fediverse has tried to establish.
But that’s the situation currently anyway.
They are still the largest fediverse platform.
Like to your points
- Sure, but now those people just won’t join the fediverse
- How do you figure? What persona of user is there that would have joined an independent instance but join threads instead? The fediverse itself has no draw, besides being more independent.
- And that’s different than now, how? Every fediverse platform is essentially implementing features that large social media giants have had for years.
- This is true, but what’s the problem with that? Most fediverse users were accustomed to large amounts of content from other platforms and left (or at least also use the fediverse) the only downside would be giving meta more data, but they can just scrape that same data from the fediverse anyway. All they need to do is quietly set up a private instance and set a bot account on that instance to follow everything from every instance it could find.
Someone in another thread mentioned that they would likely display ads near content from independent instances, and that’s a good point imo. They’d be directly making a profit off of private instances, which would be fucked up.
I hear a lot of talk of EEE too, which is a legitimate worry also. there must be a way to accept the first 2 Es without the extinguish. I’m hoping the admin community is thinking about that more than “meta evil” when defederating threads.
What I am describing is how EEE would apply in this context. Decenterlized spaces can be undermined by corperate power becoming the supermajority, subsuming the spaces valuable users and content, and then walling themselves off causing people to abandon the original project as their social graph has once again become held hostage to the users the super instance has. We already see this here with Beehave de-federating from Lemmy.World. Lemmy.World holds most of the content, so losing access to that harms the smaller instance tremendously more than the largest instance, because they've become reliant on that content. Arguing that Meta is not a threat to the fedeverse for this reason is suggesting that decentralization isn't necesary, because they are 30 times larger than the entirety of mastodon combined. It will be centralization on a whole nother scale to anything we've seen so far here. And this is literally how EEE works to undermine decenterlized networks strengths, which rests in not having all the power held in one instances hands.
Your counterpoints make just as much sense in the other EEE spaces. Why didn't they just keep doing what they were doing after google walled them off? Why did they largely abandon the decenterlized space and follow the supermajority that held all the users they grew accustomed to interacting with?
The reality is that this is what happened. I can't really debate with you about this because it's not just prediction, this has an existing history of happening. I hope you're right, but the record so far does not agree with you.
Luckily, we’ll find out not too long from now. Hope you’re right.
If I wanted a centralized space of as many users as possible then I wouldn't be on the fediverse and be on reddit, Facebook, tiktok, etc.
I'm here because I want to sever my connection to those type of corporate run platforms as much as possible, and being federated with them defeats the purpose of being here for me. Why wouldn't I then just use those sites directly instead of putting up with the growing pains of the fediverse and fragmentation of communities?
Meta evil and people I think may not understand that meta will read/mine your public fediverse activity if it wants to, regardless of federation status.
People may not know how sites block other search engine crawlers (scrapers like google) and it may surprise them realize that all that's done is adding a line to a text file that says "if you call yourself a xyz browser then you can't scrape" and hope that the crawler reads and obeys that request. We arent talking about iron clad defenses here. The same goes for defederating.
Defederating from facebook will remove the means for facebook to actually federate the way we are used to seeing on lemmy - we wont see their content, we can't react to their content, and at least at the beginning they wont see our content.
But if they wanted to, facebook could just consume the lemmyverse and show the top posts on facebook. The only thing that would stop them is a lawsuit. Even then, if they wanted to it would just come down to money - cost of a fine vs cost of losing facebookers to the fediverse.
Facebook needs to only emulate the fediverse as they have emulated the rest of the internet into facebook. Hell, if they wanted to they could just show friends the content their friends consumes on the fediverse and build public forums around that content. Kind of like how facebook (and reddit, etc) work.
Folks may want an option to completely wall-out facebook from ever observing any of their actions on the fediverse. Its a nice idea but it's not something that defederating brings. Public internet is public to all, unfederated, including facebook.
Of course we can request that facebook not scrape the fediverse and complain when they do, but I don't see that as having much momentum for change.
It is not about the data. It is about the users and communities. They can copy the content but a threads user couldn't really ask a fediverse user a question through threads. The interaction is why we are on social media. If threads is not part of the fediverse, it can't provide the users with the same interactions. the fediverse wants users on many different smaller servers. We need to get the user to move to such a server, if we want the fediverse to work.
This is what I mean.
Meta is going to get public data one way or another. It’s not hard to scrape the fediverse normally.
Like all defederating them does is make the fediverse more closed off, not less
You can’t even really block scrapers without actually locking down a site. You can just ask nice bots (like googles crawler) to not index you.