Please defederate from threads.net

Meta is a cancer, there is no benefit to the company being given any access to this instance.

There is nothing to gain from interaction with Meta/Threads

Meta don't deserve any chances, I'm here to get away from that toxic bull and would much prefer it to be blocked from any instance I interact with.

Here's my not-at-all-qualified take:

Let the federation ride. If Threads users add meaningful content and activity, then cool.

But the second we see a Meta ad, pull that fucking plug. We should not be distributing their ads for free (or at all).

When I last looked at the defederations of some Mastodon servers, everyone was already blocking Threads. This was a year ago. Instances running Lemmy and Kbin and like should probably do the same.

Fully agreed, anyone who doesn't either works for Meta or can't see the writing on the wall about what this will do to the fediverse.

I'll be blocking it the first time it shows up on my feed anyway.

I presume this will be the case, but don’t think there’s been any official announcement yet. The majority of current servers have planned to resist by defederating.

Unfortunately, as much as I like Lemmy. It's kind of stuck in a catch-22 situation.

The bigger it grows the more likely it is to be destroyed by "bad actors"

This seems like a very important discussion but let me tell you how I came across it. It's possible many others on Aussie Zone fall into a similar boat as mine. If not please ignore.

I only use Voyager to interact with Lemmy regularly. Occasionally I check out Aussie Zone via a browser but that's very rare.

I think the 'Default feed' for Voyager is 'Home' which are the coms I've subbed to. I didn't even know what 'Local' was until I looked it up just now (while trying to find out if Voyager can list all the coms of an instance like the coms page in a desktop browser, which I don't think it does).

So I was surprised not to see this discussion earlier after seeing it pop up more broadly across the lemmyverse. Turns out that's because I never selected the Local feed to see what everyone is talking about and because I wasn't subbed to Meta (as in the Aussie Zone com, not the company) until now.

If my ignorance is unusual for Aussie Zone folk then please ignore this comment. If it's possible that lots of other active or semi-active local users are not seeing this discussion is there any way to highlight it across the instance?

So this means I'll be seeing what people post on threads in my lemmy app?

I don't quite understand, would it be harder to defederate later, once they start becoming evil? Lemmy and Mastodon were founded to actively distance ourselves from the likes of Twitter and Reddit. We're not here because it's the only option we have or because we're creating a whole new system. We're here because we chose to and decide that we could live without relying on those big corporations. Surely, people here are more willing to give Meta the middle finger and wouldn't mind blocking Threads if that ever happened right?

This elitism bandwagoning hurts the goal of providing alternatives to closed source proprietary platforms for social media.

If you want an open and viable alternative to proprietary platforms running social media then you must have a willingness to include those who want to be part of said platforms.

This is how I think about this.

Edit - this is what comes to mind when I think about this

Forgive my newbness, but is it up to instance owners to defederate? Or individual users? I don’t really know how it works.

A few points to make on this topic:

1. There is presently nobody to defederate from: They aren't in the fediverse yet, and while we can guess they'll use threads.net as their domain, that's all it would be - a guess. There is no point preemptively defederating from that domain when we don't even know it's what they'll use in federation.
2. Defederating is trivial from the instance level. Just type their domain to the "blocked instances" setting and it's done for everyone. This move can be made at any time in under a minute.
3. A change to the behaviour of aussie.zone this large will likely be passed by the users in some way. It's not a thing to undertake lightly.
4. The new Lemmy allows users to block instances for them personally. If you don't want to personally interract with Threads, just add them to your block list and it's done. You won't see anything from that instance. It'll also mean you won't see replies to their comments made from here. ^*

^* You can't actually defederate from them yet, as the "block instance" UI searches for federated domains and won't permit you to add threads.net as that domain is not federated. You'll need to do this if/when they actually federate with the rest of us.

Personally I think this is ridiculous.

First, there's the simple fact that Lemmy's interaction with Threads will likely be the same relatively rare/limited interaction we currently have with Mastodon. People might show up to comment from time to time, and we'll be able to @mention their users. But that's about it. It's not a serious issue for Lemmy instances to be concerned about.

But second, I think pre-emptive defederation here, regardless of whether we're talking about Lemmy or Mastodon instances, is ridiculous. If they start doing bad things, it is trivial to defederate at that time. If they don't, we're much better off letting them participate and benefit from the increased number and variety of users with whom we can interact thanks to their participation in the fediverse.

Don't fall for FUD when there's an opportunity knocking.

I'm not sure that most Lemmy users have much to fear from Threads because it's a microblogging thing which Lemmy isn't. I

I'm on Kbin where there's slightly more of a concern in theory because Kbin has microblogging capabilities baked in but I don't think it's used very much (I have a separate Mastodon account anyway and that's where the real discussions about all this are happening understandably).

In practice I don't know, I have a strong feeling Meta aren't really interested in this corner of the fediverse right now, they want to be a Twitter-killer after all not a Reddit competitor. Which is why if you're interested in the subject most of the actual debate is going on Mastodon or equivalents.

None of this is going against your main point necessarily, Meta are obviously very shady. But also innocent until proven guilty, you know? Most instances have a pretty solid code of law.

Mods are going to be in for a bumpy ride though...

@[email protected]

I think it's really worth watching this Flipboard interview/podcast with Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon.

https://flipboard.video/w/cTBu4HusskGTuPBahqm6WY

He sees it as a good thing, and I'm inclined to trust his judgement - it lets us share our ideals and culture with a broader audience, it lets us engage with a larger amount of content (if we want to), and we still have the power to block it at any point if we decide it's a bad thing. Pre-emptive defederation takes the power out of users hands, only grants more power to large silicon valley corporations, and is self-defeating if the goal is to try to move to a federated web.

Also, their federation is likely to have a near non-existent impact on aussie.zone, given we're a link-aggregation platform and not a microblog like Mastodon or Kbin.

I'm deeply conflicted about this, I want federation with big services, I think that is part of the raison d'etre of #activitypub.

But I know the risks, I'm old enough to remember #Microsoft embracing and extinguishing the browser, #Goggle defederating from #XMPP and #Facebook predatory tactics.

Also, I'm starting to think that federation with the big players is unstoppable. The protocol is open and there is no way to get every instance operator on board with the #fedipact . If people want to see the big players' content they'll move to an instance that federates with them. And defederating from those that connect to threads sounds like a Zealot's suicide pact.

Ideally we'd need some kind of legal protection, that makes big services accoutable for what they do with open protocols, but the best we can hope is that the threat of such legislation being enacted will scare the bigs ones into playing fair.

In the mean while there are no technical measures that I can think of and the social measures are unlikely to work. The only thing we can do is to enter into this with open eyes, aware of our history and hope for the best.