The entire userbase of the Fediverse is a rounding error for Meta. We aren’t significant.
True, I think Threads got 10 millions subscribers in 7 hours.
i read earlier today that they’re up to 30m
I wonder how many of those are bots
At least 7.
As much as possible, corporate interest and action on social media needs to be exposed and dismantled. Capitalism is inherently antisocial and comes with a bunch of social hierarchies and unquestionable “accepted” inequalities embedded within. Plus I don’t enjoy trawling through miles of boring carbon copy jokes and endless attempts at edgy right-wing tinged “humour”. The cancerous spread of fascistic “freedom of speech” culture that defies the logic of the concept destroyed reddit.
trawling through miles of boring carbon copy jokes
That was the worst part of Reddit for me. Looking for answers and getting nothing but shit posts or people flaming
Letting Facebook have any sort of success in Lemmy is such a bad idea, they burn everything they touch.
Yes please defederate this shit and leave us alone
Defederate from, and anybody who federates with Meta. Fuck Meta/Zuck, they are enshittification incarnate.
Absolutely. Defederate and boycott instances that federate with meta
So he actually made one?
Yeah Threds is supposed to have federation (activepub) support. Pretty clear EEE attempt to kill federated services by Meta.
I’m new to federated services here and have a question. If say Threads federates with mastodon.social and I interact with threads content through mastodon.social does Meta get my information and data or do they only get a minimal set of info like username and the instance my interaction originated from?
They would get anything the activity pub protocol gives them, which I can’t imagine is much. I’d have to look into it but I assume they’re pretty much only sharing the stuff you see.
… Ok so I looked it up (couldn’t leave it on the assumption lol). https://activitypub.rocks/implementation-report/ Have a look at the standard here if you like. The only privacy related one I can see is the location header, but it’s optional and not implemented by most fediverse apps.
That’s not to say it will never become possible for Facebook to get more info. They will absolutely try to throw their weight around if they gain traction in the space, and could, in theory, require more info be shared for fediverse instances that want to federate with Threads. This is why it’s important that fediverse admins don’t get too chummy with the zucc.
Meta will absolutely try to appear friendly at first, perhaps offering open source development assistance, consulting or training, but it will be a farce to gain power in the space.
Meta are ruthless in the social media space.
Got it thank you. I’m not happy about meta moving in this direction. I hope that Threads is a flop. I Ditched Facebook after the Cambridge Analytical episode and never looked back. I appreciate the info.
The latter. Only your server admin has your info.
They get a minimal set of info, like you stated, username, content of post, post time/date. The other info stays on your instance.
That’s beside the point though, the idea is to own the fediverse, but not through hacking or data gathering. EEE is the way to go here.
I wasn’t trying to make or advocate for a point I was just wondering about the immediate/short term consequences to my personal privacy.
Also what is EEE?
Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. The term was first coined by the US DOJ, but then MS addopted it and was used internally. Basically it means that it’s a lot easier to destroy something from within than from the outside. So, you have to become “one of them” in order to set the wheels in motion.
That’s a great description
jup, there is already a preview app, someone i follow on Microblogging-fedi has signed up and got automatically banned within seconds
but yes they’re launching in America first (uh) and they will be federating someday maybe probably
they’re launching in America first
Because GDPR makes Threads to be illegal in Europe, thanks to Ireland and the European Union 😆
Can you explain how they are ilegal? I don’t know anything about legislation ;(
I don’t know whether you’re a woman or a man, but let’s say you’re a woman. You know your husband goes to work everyday, you know his car, you know his licence plate and you know where he works.
Now, you see a picture on the internet, like a disco bar, or a penthouse. And you see, in the parking lot, some vehicles, being your husband’s among them. Now what?
Or the other way, your husband sees your car at an expensive beauty shop, instead of being at a hospital, because you said you were visiting your dying relative.
Privacy must be protected, it’s a very important thing in European countries, and licence plates belong to that privacy, as well as phone numbers.
Threads does not really want or care about our tiny userbase. They want the normies and they want to OWN most of the marketshare of this protocol
I don’t think Threads need the fediverse to survive or thrive.
And correct me if I’m wrong but I think Mastodon’s biggest instances don’t mind federating with Threads.
Why on earth would they be interested in federating with meta??
A lot of them are taking a “let’s give them a chance” stance which is fucked because we have over a decade of social media history as to why they’ve already spent that chance and cannot be trusted. There’s also the fact of Meta meeting with Mastodon instance admins and having them sign NDAs if they agree to talk.
I won’t be on an instance that federates with them, personally.
There is more then a century of proven ‘companies lie for profit and will do anything upto and including global genocide to increase their bottom dollar’
Never trust a company when they provide their goals.
This just keeps getting worse and worse.
Is there any mention of which instances have committed to NOT federating with Meta?
I think Zuck underestimates how disgusting his userbase behaves. I really don’t want to read the shit I had to flee from back in the day.
I think he knows, he just doesn’t care, as he probably benefits from it. 🤷
Tbh I’m seeing a lot of Mastodon instances Admins saying they wont defederate Threads straight away; they want to see what Meta does/demands of all over instances first. The instance I’m part of (Fosstodon) is also doing the “wait and see” tactic.
BUT I strongly suspect most will end up defederating with Threads within a week due to Meta’s shit moderation and attempts to bully other, larger instances into giving them privacy info.
Wtf. What possible good thing do they expect to see from meta?
People. Most of the people using Threads are not garbage just because Meta is.
I’ll likely be personally blocking the entire instance the day they connect with ActivityPub.
Ehhhhhhhh yeah they can stay over there. Totally free to join us here though, separately, on another account. They are the dark side, with the cookies and all. We have beans. Better nutrition.
most of the people are not garbage
Guess what? Neither are most people on FB and Twitter, but it’s allowing the garbage minority to have free reign that make those platforms unbearable.
I can guarantee that the same will happen with Threads sooner or later since it’s the same corporation with the same company-wide priorities that allowed FB to become a breeding ground for fascism.
Facebook was ruined for me when they stopped showing me what my friends were up to, and instead plastered my feed with ads and “popular” posts instead of the things I care about. I haven’t logged in for years. I should delete Facebook, but since it isn’t on any of my devices they aren’t getting anything from me
I mean Threads isn’t even starting in the EU yet, bc they can’t comply with the GDPR. Nothing good can come of this.
yeah him and his 30 million users
*70 million as of this evening
Edit: providing source https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-07/meta-s-threads-has-70-million-signups-surprising-zuckerberg
Honestly one needs to look at the economic ensentives in order to understand metas goals.
Meta does not make any money from content on the federverse. Therefore, they have no reason to support its growth or future. In fact I would go as far as to say that they actually are going to try and EEE.
What do you mean by EEE?
Thanks!
They aren’t going to try to EEE. ActivityPub was just an easy protocall to build off of quickly. They don’t care about the fediverse. They have almost zero incentive to waste effort trying to destroy it, plus it’s open source, so worst case we just fork it and move on.
ActivityPub was just an easy protocall to build off of quickly
If they didn’t want to federate, they wouldnt have a need for ActivityPub or any kind of similar protocol.
EEE means embrace, extend, extenguish. It’s to say they’ll start using it, extend it so they are required to continue using it, then stop supporting it or actively kill it. It has nothing to do with federation, whether they do or don’t.
I know that, but if that’s not the goal, then what else do they hope to achieve by implementing ActivityPub? It means they plan to federate with the larger fediverse, and you can bet that there’s a carefully calculated business reasoning behind it.
They likely used it because most of the work is already done. They could quickly turn around a new app as they notice Twitter fucking up, rather than starting from scratch. It already exists, works, and is tested.
You’re not getting my point - if federation wasn’t the goal, they wouldn’t even need anything like ActivityPub. It’s a protocol to allow different servers to talk to each other in a way that is just not necessary and way too much overhead if you’re planning to have an insular solution controlled by just a single entity anyway. Picking it as the protocol for internal-only communication between your own servers would simply be a very questionable architectural choice, Meta’s Engineers know better than that. Threads already works without supporting ActivityPub, so it’s obviously not needed for making the app run. Them also working on supporting ActivityPub is just creating an additional, public interface in order to connect to the fediverse, which they otherwise simply wouldn’t need to do.
Just noticed another possible confusion: ActivityPub is just a protocol, a definition of how servers can talk to each other. There’s no ready-made implementation that Meta could be using to get a headstart, they are most definitely developing their own implementation of it. So even if they were actually using it without wanting to federate, the only thing they’d be saving on is designing their own protocol, but that’s not really beneficial because then they’ll have to deal with a protocol that wasn’t actually made for their use case and according to their specific needs.
Wasn’t there just a post about how all instance admins can access user action logs from all instances?
Would this potentially allow meta to grab info on users based on their upvote/downvotes? I’m pretty sure my email is linked to my account here, and it’s not a far jump to link it to any other accounts I use it for to build a profile depending on the data available.
Meta might already be secretly running any number of existing instances. For that matter, someone else you don’t trust definitely already is.
I guess that’s the ultimate trade off with social media. There is no expectation of privacy and no way to avoid the corporations looking to influence you to make a buck.
I love that we have options but I hate the direction the internet as a whole is going. It makes me sad when I think too much about it.
idk why they are logging and how much amount of information they are logging but atleast they aren’t selling that to the third parties or using that for personalized advertisements.
That’s the thing, we don’t know that. We have to go on their word and look how that has turned out in the past.
Reddit said no API changes and then they change the API, Facebook said they secure our data, and then the Cambridge analytics scandal came to light, Equifax told us that they could be trusted with our most personal credit information and they had a huge data breach.
The fediverse is going to be new to a lot of people, such as myself, who don’t yet fully understand the ins and outs of how it works. It’s my understanding that it’s open source, but I unfortunately don’t have the competencies to review code and see where every piece of data is going and what is actually logged. I have heard of some websites being transparent with the data that’s logged, but there’s no guarantee that they’re telling the whole story.
All that being said, I’m always happy when there’s a decentralized version of a service that people can use as an alternative.
It’s my understanding that it’s open source, but I unfortunately don’t have the competencies to review code and see where every piece of data is going and what is actually logged.
I am a beginner software engineer and I kinda have no clue about many parts of the source code too, but one thing I could notice is that there are lot’s of people that are actively contributing to the source code. I hope if lemmy tries something funny, the open source contributers would be the first people to call it out.
I wish all instances did. Sadly some have a growth mindset bigger than their own ego and don’t mind the Zuck’
Until they are killed by the zuck
Or until their quality users will leave
My mom has an account and I just… [sigh]
What’s with all the hate about federating with Threads? I thought people would be happy to hear a big player is coming to the fediverse that’s going to bring a bunch of people with it. “Normies” will probably never use Mastodon or Lemmy but might use Threads, so being able to communicate with them while staying on my little community-ran Mastodon instance is a win for the fediverse in my book. And if somebody’s annoying or whatever, you can always block them, right? Can somebody clarify why people think everyone should automatically defederate with them and lose such a big userbase? I mean, I hate Facebook/Meta as much as the next guy, but more users are more users…
What’s with all the hate about federating with Threads? I thought people would be happy to hear a big player is coming to the fediverse that’s going to bring a bunch of people with it.
It’s because corporations will embrace, extend, and extinguish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Allowing corporations to have any level of control will result in this place dying.
It doesn’t even have to be extinguishing. It’s bad enough if meta can reap the benefits of associating with FOSS (better privacy for example), while making their app the gateway to the fediverse. And of course that app will be spyware with social media on top. It’s like greenwashing.
Threads owned by Zuck, which has both a “for-profit” and “unethical” mindset. In my opinion this mindset isn’t fit for the fediverse in the place where it is now (people actually care about the community). Users will always come, we don’t need papa Zuck for that. Healthy communities grow naturally, and I feel like the fediverse community is healthy enough.
Somebody posted an article here a few days ago about the ways big corporations kill Open source software. The broad overview was essentially that they’ll adopt the standard, then expand on it to create a more feature rich walled garden. Then they axe the connections to the original protocols when they have critical mass, and begin the enshittification process. If meta is allowed to succeed in the Fediverse, it’s the first step to meta owning any worthwhile platforms in the Fediverse.
Nobody should want any corporate social platforms in the fediverse they spy on you sell your data to the highest bidder and ultimately all are basically like the corner drug dealer
All your fediverse data is public, they don’t need to join the fediverse or “spy” on you to get it
I’m sure there’s no profit motive for Meta to confederate.
They do have a profit motive, because meta is in competition with lemmy for people’s time and attention. The more attention/time/views meta gets, the better for them. So it is in their interest to find a way to create their own instance, make it the most popular one, and then use that popularity to shut out all other instances, effectively killing them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Meta is a “for profit” company, so every move they make is for profit and planned with their shareholders/board of directors, to approve their moves. These people only see $$$, sad but true.
So only people without profit motive can beat part of it… Change is scary I guess
Allowing people and corporations with poor to no ethics considerations whose sole motive is profit to control everything isn’t change, it’s the default that the Fediverse is trying to get away from.
Won’t someone think of the corporate investors that need to make money on my memes?
If I wanted to hear what people who use FB products had to say, I’d be on those platforms
Nobody said anything about FB users. I have seen a bunch of people I follow on Twitter trying to move to Threads. And if I could just completely abandon Twitter and communicate with these people I follow via Mastodon, I’d rather choose for them to move there instead. And nobody’s making you talk to them if you don’t want to, right? We are talking about ~being able~ to talk to them, not having to.
And I didn’t say anything about talking to them
Its that many people are convinced that Meta will EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). However we can’t just all defederate Meta from the Fediverse. We have to embrace them the same way they are embracing us. If they decide to try to kill us off, we will resist and stay united.