Thanks, I appreciate it! It took a stupidly long time. :V
On some level, it’s probably not that important that people understand all this stuff, but I think the most dangerous thing is people believing that their data will be protected if Threads gets defederated. Any other confusion is basically harmless, but that’s the one thing where people have a false sense of security, because Meta has exactly the same access to your data whether or not they get defederated.
No, I don’t want to? Weird take.
There are literally, not exaggerating, over one billion Instagram accounts in existence. It’s self-evidently not the case that they have just silently registered everybody a Threads account and are counting those numbers.
Lemmy communities are “groups” in ActivityPub parlance, and groups do exist on the microblogging platforms. Using Mastodon as an example for now, a Masto user could find the group equivalent to a Lemmy community and make a post and/or comment there and it would show up on lemmy.world and anybody else who federates with that Masto instance. In reality, the groups experience is kind of terrible and a poor interface to these thread-style communities, and you lose all kinds of features like the recency/score sorting algorithm, the ability to downvote things, etc.
It would take a true masochist to post to lemmy.world from Mastodon, which is why you almost never see it. I’ve seen one Mastodon user in my time on the threadiverse so far. Most people who are already on the microblogging side of the fediverse have just chosen to register a separate account on a threadiverse instance so they can have an actual usable interface rather than stuffing a link aggregator through a blog-shaped hole.
Groups don’t even exist on Threads currently. Maybe they will by the time they implement ActivityPub, but they may not consider that to be a core goal as a microblogging, Twitter-style platform which has no obvious use for them. This would currently make Threads an even worse interface to the threadiverse (kind of ironic) than Mastodon, which I can’t stress enough is already awful. You would just have to search for individual posts by browsing somewhere like lemmy.world directly, copying and pasting the URLs into the Threads app or web site to populate the conversation in their interface in order to reply to the posts and comments there.
In short, using Lemmy via Threads is probably going to be such a nightmare that only turbo-nerds will try to do it, and turbo-nerds are more likely to realize “This is awful and I should just go join Lemmy or kbin or something,” than persist with that hassle long-term. Now, kbin users have more justification to be concerned about how Threads will impact their communities, because kbin supports microblogging directly–in corporate terms, it’s like if Reddit and Twitter combined into one site that you could tab between on the fly. This means kbin users will be more likely to see Threads content and vice versa.
The other problem here is that I don’t think a lot of people actually know how defederation works. There’s lots of takes like “I don’t want Meta to get my data, so we have to defederate.” But defederating stops you from receiving their content, not the other way around. Once Threads actually is federating, defederating it will stop people seeing posts from Threads users. That has its own merits, but it doesn’t protect your data in any way. If you don’t want corporate entities to access your online posts, either send them via some private end-to-end encrypted system where only you and the direct recipients can see them, or don’t post them online at all. The Internet is on the Internet.
Now, a bit more of an explanation on what defederation is: while the decentralized nature complicates things (since different servers will have different defederation lists), defederation is closer to a Reddit shadow-ban than whatever it is people are imagining. If literally everybody defederated Meta/Threads, they would still see our content, but from their (Threads users’) perspective, it would just seem like we’re all giving them the silent treatment, because we never respond to their posts or comments.
Yeah, they can vote and reply and all of that and others who remain federated will see their interactions, but you or any other server who defederates them won’t.
Yeah, my understanding is that defederation prevents any incoming communication, so you won’t see any posts or comments that come from lemmy.bullshit, however users from lemmy.bullshit will still see all of your comments and posts from lemmy.world unless they choose to defederate you back.
Yeah, the front page is working just fine, what’s not as good is going to a specific community for a subject you’re interested in which currently has 1-3 posts and zero replies.
I believe they’re talking about a situation where somebody is like …
Wow, everybody check out this amazing thread! https://someother.instan.ce/post/1194109
Anybody who sees that link and is not already from someother.instan.ce now has to track down that post on their home instance in order to interact with it, which is a bad experience. It’s not the absolute worst thing in the world, like the home URL for the discussion we’re in right now is https://lemmy.world/post/1194109 and if you paste that URL into your local domain’s search it should find you the relevant discussion locally, but it still kinda sucks. In theory this would be sort of solve-able on the server end by having it search for any instance links behind the scenes and re-write other people’s links to point to the equivalent page on your own instance, but right now there’s no “nice” way to handle that situation.
The linked page specifically tracks Lemmy, although it’s not clear to me whether it’s tracking posts by users from Lemmy instances or posts to Lemmy instances, which is a medium-sized distinction (the latter would include kbin, Mastodon and other Fediverse users who are posting to Lemmy from their home instance, while the former would obviously include only Lemmy users).
It’s a bit self-serving of me to phrase it this way, but I do think the Reddit debacle shaved off a disproportionately not-terrible segment of the Reddit userbase. I think you could make your comment about Redditors instead and it would still be fair. There’s obviously a lot of Twitter users we don’t want here, but if we got the top 0.1% of Twitter users by quality? That’s not bad.
Time for somebody to make an EU-exclusive Mastodon instance called realthreads.legit and put it up on app stores. The real way to grow the fediverse in a hurry is to trick people into it. /s
Anti-Meta Fedi Pact, you fill in a web form saying you’re an instance owner with your instance admin name and at some point you should be added to list (manually).
I think it just runs on good faith, I don’t think there’s any verification that you are who you say you are.
Thanks, this is extremely thorough and easy to understand. Very well put. I can see how for anyone with sufficient distrust of Meta and its users, it makes sense to defederate anybody who might serve as a relay between them.
In the meantime, I hope kbin can catch up before Threads starts federating, so I can just interact with people from here. Currently, there’s people who I can’t see/can’t see me from kbin, not due to defederation but simple bugs in kbin’s current ActivityPub implementation. If/when mastodon.social gets defederated, there’s people I won’t have any mechanism to speak to without registering a third account somewhere in the fediverse.
This explains why it’s a good idea to defederate from Meta/Threads, but why defederate from other non-signatory instances?
Definitely agree, I’m not personally offended when, e.g. Americans use words that I wouldn’t use because they carry different meanings here. The only thing is that not everyone is a word nerd who follows the shifting meanings of words in different areas. While some people will find certain words offensive no matter what, I think the bulk of the offense is from people who don’t know either where you’re from or that the meaning and intent are different there, so I think it’s worthwhile for both sides to learn those differences.
@MilkToastGhost As long as we’re YSKing, just want to let you know that the word “spaz”/“spastic” has a complicated history. While its meaning has drifted heavily in the US, in the UK especially it remains closely associated with the disability cerebral palsy, and is considered highly offensive to many. The relative innocuousness of the US version has led to it being used in pop culture (e.g. songs by Beyonce and Lizzo, and also Mario Party 8 for Wii), which in turn has resulted in recalls and edits when they were released in the UK to some offense.
I’m not the word police, you can say whatever you want, but it’s handy to know when you’re speaking to a global audience how your words might be interpreted.
For the most part, Threads content just wouldn’t appear on Lemmy at all. It’s like how you can’t see Mastodon users’ timelines on Lemmy. e.g. Jeri Ryan from Star Trek is on
mastodon.world, but you can’t read her blog from Lemmy because it just doesn’t display microblog content, only stuff that’s sorted into groups (communities).The one exception is that Jeri Ryan can track down the equivalent group on her Mastodon instance and “microblog” directly into the group. Mastodon has some hacky tweaks to do things like reading the first sentence as a heading, the second line as a URL, and the third line as the post body, so if you’re especially dedicated you can post to Lemmy from Mastodon. If Threads cares enough, they could add similar functionality to Threads to make it technically possible to post to Lemmy as long as you try hard enough, but just regular people’s blog posts on Threads won’t display on Lemmy at all.