FaceDeer

Actually, I’d say “let them use TREDZ and destroy themselves if they want, problem solved.” In this day and age nobody wants a proprietary image format, and if Threads won’t display in a browser they’ve just blown one of their legs off.

This is a general problem with trying to make Threads depend on proprietary formats, they can’t do that and still have it work in an ordinary web browser.

I was thinking by killing them, but your way is probably better for everyone.

You just need to defeat its current holder.

If you’re going to disable the web page and prevent API usage, why are you even running a Federated server to begin with? It seems to be missing the whole point of the protocol to be trying to use it as a private forum or instant messenger, there are other projects far better suited to that sort of thing.

(also have none of you heard of consent?)

Have you not heard of public speech? When you stand on a street corner and shout your opinions to the world you can’t expect everyone wandering past to seek out your explicit consent before they can hear you. Posting on a public forum means you are deliberately putting your words out where vast numbers of random people can see them. Yes, even Meta.

If you don’t want that to be the case then this is probably not the right protocol to be using in the first place.

Heh. A passive-aggressive “It’s okay that you interpreted me wrong.” But no apology for accusing me of supporting child molesters.

Which you did do, by the way. You responded to me describing my stance with “You can do so and tell everyone how you gave the child molesters a chance.” Since I still hold that stance, do you still think I should be telling everyone how I gave child molesters a chance? You should really be more careful about slinging accusations like that around, it’s not something people let go of lightly.

I proved you wrong

What? I stated an opinion about how federation works, and you immediately accused me of supporting child molesters.

But whatever. I’ll try engaging one more time.

I dont even get what your problem is.

Okay. You said:

we might wanna discuss future rules so to not fight about everything.

and in your most recent comment:

There already are “pacts” in place to defederate certain parties and behave a certain way. it is how laws came to existence, just so you know.

All of this implies that you’re proposing some sort of enforceable or rule-based system to decide who gets to federate with whom. That’s what I’m arguing against. You even say yourself that “it is ever instances right to do as they please.” That’s what I’m saying - that I think it’s a bad idea for there to be global “rules” for what instances can and can’t federate with. It’d be like if the HTTP protocol included rules about whether you could communicate with specific websites depending on who owned the servers they were on.

“Some data format” is still a pretty vague handwave, IMO. What would they implement that other Fediverse users would need to care about? Some kind of proprietary image or video format? I don’t see how that would gain traction.

Fediverse users can already link to FB/IG/WhatsApp content. Are you suggesting embedding it somehow? I’m not sure how that could be done in a proprietary manner that other implementations couldn’t copy.

“We now allow big arse videos” is definitely not a feature that couldn’t be reverse engineered. Instances can already do their own hosting, or not, depending on the resources the host wants to dedicate.

I’m sure that Meta would just love to be able to push a button that made all their competitors die. Everyone wants that button. Look around threads like this and count how many users would love to push that button themselves and wipe Meta out with it. But I’m just not seeing how Meta is going to do that by federating. As long as everyone keeps on their toes about how their resources are being used and what extensions they’re adding to ActivityPub - something that they should be doing regardless of whether Meta is involved - the Fediverse seems pretty solid against attack to me.

Meta could be running a completely ordinary Mastodon or Lemmy server and monitoring data through that. Or they’re using the API of some ordinary server. Or they’re simply scraping the web directly.

I can understand using stuff like Authorized Fetch to control bandwidth, but this obsession with hiding data that has been explicitly posted on a public forum is frankly kind of weird.

and then cut off the greater Fediverse as a whole once their user base is established and much larger than ours.

I have bad news for you, then. Or good news, or whatever. Threads already has 160 million users. I thought one of the talking points was that Threads was going to overwhelm the Fediverse when it connected?

We don’t want them interacting with us at all.

Don’t speak for everyone. The whole point of the Fediverse is that everyone can have different opinions and nobody can unilaterally cut someone else out of it.

If you don’t want to interact with Threads, there are plenty of instances that have already defederated and lots of clients allow users to block by instance. You don’t have to. But if someone else does want to engage with Threads users, you shouldn’t try to stop that.

They can analyze our posts, comments, and upvotes/downvotes without there being any Threads integration at all. This is an open protocol and we’re posting in public.

Straight to the child porn, that seems like a new Godwin’s law these days.

Obviously any instance can choose to defederate with any other for it’s own reasons. I’m talking about protocol rules. Did you see any mention of child porn in them? Going to go yell at OP for supporting child porn too?

Edit: oh, you are OP. How ironic.

I don’t expect anything in particular from them. My position all throughout all of this is that we simply shouldn’t be committing to defederate from Threads preemptively before they’ve even had a chance to show what they’re going to actually do.

There are plenty of situations where companies “open up” in ways that may not seem to be immediately in their self-interest but that actually work out to their benefit when you consider larger strategic goals or even just the good will it gets them. Meta just so happens to be very active in developing and releasing important open-source projects, for example their release of the LLaMA AI models basically sparked the same flourishing of open source large language model development that StabilityAI’s release of Stable Diffusion did for the art generators. Maybe you can come up with ulterior motives for all that, but the end result was still a positive one for the open source community. The same could happen with Threads and the Fediverse.

I think that having “rules” about who is allowed to federate with whom is antithetical to the open nature of ActivityPub, and I disapprove of any that don’t have a purely technical reason behind them.

What specific features do you have in mind that could be implemented in a closed-source manner that couldn’t be reverse-engineered and implemented by open-source instance software too? It’s not easy to come up with such a thing, and it’s unclear what benefit it would serve Meta that they can’t accomplish by just not joining the Fediverse in the first place.

If Threads implements asymmetric federation, I’ll shrug and ignore them because I’ll never see their content and it won’t ever affect me.

Doesn’t Threads already have a bullshit terms of service? That’s my default assumption for any website, really. But even if they don’t, ActivityPub is an open protocol and so of course my data is being collected by who-knows-how-many organizations already. Meta doesn’t need to do anything new at all to get access to it.

I’d say that the vast majority of economic actors - both companies like Meta and individual people - are generally acting in a selfish manner. It’s one of the great successes of modern market economies that most of the time that selfishness can be harnessed to serve the public good in various ways, so I’d want to see more detail about what exactly they’re doing before calling it bad.

I’ve certainly never said I trust Meta, just that I don’t think they’re the maniacal evil overlords many of these discussions are portraying them as.

None of those things sounds inherently bad to me.

Like Israel ever intends for fighting to subside.

People always matter. It’s just that some folks have a more particular definition of what counts as “people.”

It seems to me that the “chaos” caused by those implementations has been entirely in how people reacted to them.

Threads’ implementation is planned, at least initially, to flow inward rather than outward. The posts they make won’t be seen outside of Threads at all initially, and later they intend to add that as something users will have to opt into in their settings (people rarely change their default settings so this will likely not happen much).

Even if it eventually does happen, many Fediverse server projects are already implementing features to allow users to block instances for themselves without need for defederation. If you find the comments from Threads to be annoying, block them.