Peace and quiet is so rare in social media these days, that is so not obvious that we somehow have it here

Mastodon servers that have suspended Threads.net

Exactly we're here and doing all this work on our own dime so we can have a social media site that won't turn out like every corporate social media site ever. It's already working the way we want it to without any help from Facebook, so logically giving them a seat at the table can only not help.

Preach! There’s a good opportunity here to keep this space free from the greedy hands of a bunch of rich assholes. People are so eager for there to be a ‘new twitter’ but haven’t even raised one question about whether threads has fundamentally addressed the problem that has lead to the downfall of twitter and Reddit. Meet your new boss, same as the old boss. Why the hell should we keep just hoping that some billionaire ceo will do what’s right. Even if that ceo does the right thing, they will eventually be replaced.

There can be a place on the internet free from capitalist exploitation for profit. Communities can exist solely for the sake of the community. Not every goddamn thing needs to be monetized. Send a clear message that past tactics will not fly here.

Agreed. I want this place to remain completely free from corporate fuckery.

"Peace and quiet" is very well put.

Lemm.ee is a great instance if you ever want to ride shotgun on the long road trip of the fediverse but what I love the most about this experience is exactly this....create your own server, instances, communities. We are getting an early chance to build and customize our own user experience here. The idea of keeping out what we are fighting against makes sense to me and wouldn't it be cool if @sunaurus did it early in the game like the 2nd largest instance did and beat .world to it? (if they follow suit, which I can't predict)

First of all did you make your own instance for your profile?

Second of all and more importantly I think you’re right. Even if you aren’t part of a server and they decide to federate it indirectly screws us over in the short term and we get probably get totally messed up in the long term

Some said it’s the Star Trek borg and I’m not a fan but it’s a great parallel

I'm here to escape Sillicon Valley, not to cut off contact with anyone who's chosen not to.

Absolutely on point. If it's deal with Facebook or deal with Reddit that doesn't have a partnership with Facebook I would go straight back to Reddit. Fuck Facebook and their rebrand attempt to distance themselves with the Meta shit.

100% get that shit out of here

Exactly, if we want them in our space why put up with the growing pains of the Fediverse, just go to them and forget Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. We need to be our own space or why exist at all. As said before, if you want their content just go to their sites.

Isn't it pretty simple though, if you don't want to see those posts, block them personally. Why make it so that none of the users can access them?

First you say you couldn’t care less. Then you say you’re not willing to risk it. Seems like you care a lot?

fuckfuck

You just made me Google that one, I didn’t realize he said that all these years ago. Truly a Homelander moment.

I feel like people need this reminder.

It won't matter to you if you're using ActivityPub, because they can't mine any of your data that isn't publically available through scraping anyway.

I wish I didn’t love my quest 2 so much.

Sad thing is I don’t even have time to play it.

On a side note the whole fediverse desperately needs solid moderation tools to handle it's growth.

We should make a "No Federation With Corporation" sticker

Now now now friend it sounds to me like you haven’t had your brain washing! Don’t you know Meta has our best interest when it comes to delivering high quality ads. They even collect all your data and manipulate what you see because they care so much that you’re seeing ads that might interest you in an extremely invasive way

Ok in all seriousness we cannot associate with meta becuase I’m sure they’ll make a ton of big communities and non meta users will join because of the sheer size and then close it off and go “if you want your community you gotta get the meta app” the whole embrace extend exterminate thing

Sounds like a good recipe for failure. Let’s block all instance we don’t like for whatever reason. Let’s fragment the fediverae till nobody uses it because it’s a mess of instances that don’t talk to each other for a slew of reason.

AKA Embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy

I see this article posted over and over again, but it doesn't help when many of the posters themselves don't understand it (I don't mean it's your case specifically, of course, just generalizing)

The article starts saying that Google won by EEE with a completely personal hypothesis that has absolutely no factual base (the protocol would be more used today if Google didn't use it, which is unprovable and overly optimistic)

Then proceeds talking about the office suite describing it as a similar EEE case (which was not since it was MS own thing since the beginning) and by completely ignoring the most glaring and important fact that lead to the current results (which is it being the default suite on any pc)

Then it finishes by saying that the fediverse shouldn't be popular and have many people, it should instead focus on the freedom of it (which can be agreeable)

The real message of all that article is just that yeah, the average user likes to use whatever they find served to them directly (in Gmail, on their pc, on their phone) and doesn't care at all where it come from or how it works. Convenience beats privacy for most people, out of ignorance.

There is absolutely no need for any EEE evil plan for someone who already controls the majority of users, that's just a shortcut to avoid developing something from scratch.

There are real issues with federating threads (moderation, ads, their number controlling the All/Hot pages etc).

It's not useful, in my opinion, to keep using EEE as a scarecrow without even understand that at the moment Meta has absolutely nothing to take advantage of since the number of people that use mastodon only without any meta product on their phone is so small to be nothing to them.

What meta can gain from mastodon is that they don't have to start coding from scratch, saving time and money and coming out now at the perfect moment of Twitter collapse. And maybe a bit of a positive image because they "work on open source".

That's the whole value they probably see on this atm, not way less than a million people that probably have other meta products on their phones anyway.

I think we should focus on the real problems, this EEE thing is basically becoming propaganda at this point and makes almost no sense in our specific case (lemmy vs threads)

I also agree with a defederating-first cautios approach, btw, for the reasons explained before. But we should talk, inform and discuss about the real problems

Same. There really couldn’t be a worse potential company to be involved with.

If the “wait and see” folks want to interact with Threads people, just make a Threads account.

All that will come of federating with them is the fediverse drowning in a deluge of their awfulness. We have a nice thing here - allow it to grow organically and it’ll hopefully remain a nice place.

Because most of us have friends and family who we want to keep in contact with that aren't nerds.

The fediverse is only ever going to be a playground for nerds until it has mainstream appeal or the very least is compatible with the mainstream. I want to be able to migrate completely away from having a Facebook account, but I can't because there are people who I want to and have to stay in contact with on those platforms.

If meta added fediverse support to Facebook, that would mean that I could completely get rid of my Facebook account move to a fediverse instance somewhere, or even self host my own, and still be able to keep in contact with those people who are never going to leave the mainstream site like Facebook, X, Threads, etc.

I've been saying it for years that it needs to be a legal mandate that any social media platform above a certain size should be required to support ActivityPub as a way to prevent them from having such a monopolistic hold that prevents netizens from being forced to have an account on their platform.

Maybe it's because I'm being short sighted, but I think the Fediverse is best when the individual users on the platform are the ones who get to choose who they connect with. Not the hosts of the instances.

You can't run the entire internet on a crowdfunded and volunteer-only basis, after all.

Actually..

Every single website or app on the internet is at least partially built on free software. The internet as we know couldn't exist without the crowdfunded and volunteer-only work of open-source folks.

Most content on the internet is produced for free by users. Websites like Reddit can't exist without the free work of their moderators.

So what is left to finance in order to free us from vampire companies? Hosting fees? That's cheap compared to the other costs..

The beauty of the Fediverse is that competition is easy and enshittification is difficult due to how easy it'll be to simply take your activity somewhere else,

Not sure about that, see how the migration from Twitter, Reddit and other shitty platforms takes time? You can't just leave if the people you like to interact with stay on the other side. That's how they got us. The main selling point of Thread today: "come, many people you know are already there!"

meaning that companies like Meta won't be able to do the type of things they're known for.

They wouldn't get into it without a plan to monetize it, that's the type of things they're known for..

Overall, I think people over-estimate the cost of running things on the internet. We already "paying" most of it just by producing meaningful content. We don't need tech companies to take their share in the process, we only need time and brain work to make the Fediverse easier to use so that our friends on the other side decide to join us here.

although you would be signifigantly safer on this side of activitypub though, if you install the app they get WAY more device info from you than is transferred over activitypub, which is only what is absolutely needed as far as i understand it, meaning no info on your device itself.

It would be way safer for you as a user though to have an account on this side and then view content through federation.

By having an account on a meta-owned app you are giving them vast amounts of data whereas if you have an account here on the Fediverse, All they're getting is what you choose to be publicly available on your Fediverse account...

I'd really don't understand your logic here... Because all of the data on the Fediverse is available to meta by them. They're going to be able to read all of that data regardless. As far as I can tell the only thing that defederation will accomplish is preventing you from accessing their data.

Hell, the design goal for stage 3 of my app is multi-account, multi-server feeds. After that I'm looking at integrating other services...

I can't think of anything less tempting than the endless unsatisfying feed patented by Facebook, but I can stitch it in with your fediverse feed seamlessly. I can release builds for every platform

I can't unstitch it. No one can. If we let them in, they'll wash away what this place is in hours... There's no unringing that bell

It's real, real easy to add them in, in many places and in many ways, and if we take some time we can wait until we have tools to fine-tune federation

I don't understand why you're bringing in how the fediverse works, because one of the ways that the Fediverse works is by allowing users to choose a place to call home and where they create their account but still access all the different social posts from everywhere on the Fediverse. By virtue of how the fediverse works I don't need to have an account on their website to view their content. Or at least I shouldn't have to. If they support Fediverse, I should be able to access all of that anywhere on the Fediverse I want.

The whole point is that I don't want an account on a meta platform, I don't want to volunteer that much data to them. I want to be on the Fediverse and still be able to interact with my normie friends and family who aren't ever going to be willing to get on this platform for nerds that the fediverse is going to continue to be until we are willing to play nice with others.

I think someone needs to educate me because based on my understanding of the Fediverse all they have to do is access the data stream from this instance they don't have to have full federation with them. If zuck wants your data they're going to get it because that's the way the federated platforms work.

The only thing that defederating would do is prevent you from accessing data from their platform. The only thing that de-federating them will do is prevent users on this instance from accessing or having communication with any user on that instance. If meta wants to get data from lemm.ee or any other federated platform All they have to do is read the data that's published by the servers. There isn't really anything that any fediverse instance can do to prevent other platforms from reading information. Just receiving.

Agreed. I am really into cypherpunk ideologies so naturally I want nothing to do with Facebook.

One of those trucker hats with that hard white mesh that wraps all around it.

PS thank you, sunaurus for making this post. I've been wondering where lemm.ee stands on this whole thing.

I believe refederation is as simple as defederation. It's a reversible setting.

I think a follow up question would be, would platforms who are defederated by your instance retaliate by defeterating their instance from yours? If so, would they be so willing to refederate as you are, when that time comes? Or will they hold a grudge.

If anyone's wondering, I'm on the fence but leaning toward defederation. Meta is a scourge.

Edit: also looking to find a new home instance, I don't like or appreciate the lemmy.world admin's silence on the matter and feel like they attended that "off the record" p92/threads meeting with Meta and are playing ball. I have nothing to back it up, but what more would compel such silence? If you're not sure, just say that. The lemmy community seems to appreciate transparency, and I know for certain that I do too.

You can't get a threads account without instagram (yet?), but you could definitely just join an instance that federated Threads. Probably the best option if you want that content without the Meta account

I find the best group discussions are those where people do not share opinions, but proposals.

Similarly, you could require your next discuss-post to only have top-level comments which make a (new) proposal.

Don't forget the 'not a democracy' part 😉

You're simplifying things.
You can't disregard privacy discussions as "they know everything anyway". There is a vast difference between what they know when you install Instagram/Threads and use it everyday and when you use nothing relevant to Meta. At the same time, I'm not sure how federating means your privacy is threatened either. (Let me know if I'm wrong here)
"We could just fork away" is also a wrong idea. Everyone on tech groups are crying about Manifest v3, why are they not just forking Chromium? Think of RSS. Open source coders can never compete with a billionaire dollar company with a massive user base. It's pretty easy for Meta to dominate the platform.
I'm not completely against federating with Meta, think there could also benefits to this, but it's also a pretty risky for the future of fediverse in my opinion

Thanks for the response! I want to point out one thing:

If there are ads or otherwise bad content on threads, I’m not going to see it unless I actively go follow treads accounts.

Unfortunately, this isn't true (as of Lemmy version 0.18.1). With their massive user base, Threads could easily ensure that all content by their users will always have huge amounts of upvotes. This would mean that any post or comment made by a Threads user would always be at the top of "Hot" or "Active". This also goes for any synthetic content (ads in the form of posts/comments).

Consider also that Facebook has full control over what their users see (through their algorithm) - effectively this means that they will be able to control what the top voted posts and comments are on all instances that federate with them.

Wait has .world said they would federate with Threads?

Someone else said what I was thinking. If it was a corporation like Home Depot or something maybe MAYBE, but a company with a proven track record like meta….. yeeeeeeeeaaaah no

Oh, metastasize has to be our new buzzword here.

The comment section is a good read.

One of the reasons is cyber terrorism, and idk if I should laugh or nod in agreement.

This post had made me choose this instance as my home.