Fediverse

Their stance if someone is interested https://mastodon.world/@mwadmin/110654590632768079

They basically won't do anything preemptively.

Not saying meta isn’t evil…. but the whole point of the fediverse is that anyone can start a server. Meta isn’t going to be able to track you any better just thru federation, anyone can already scrape the data. People are too quick to defederate everything

While I agreed those who do not want federation with Threads should leave (me included), lemmy.world has not bent any knee. The admin is taking a wait and see approach, and willing to block if it turns out bad

Where is the indication that lemmy.world have "bent the knee"?

Thank you for pointing out that this is so much worse than just EEE. Meta has a long history of social and political engineering, and deliberately creating a toxic environment that turned all of our parents and grandparents into deranged conspiracy theorists. They don't just let hate thrive on their platform, they artificially inflate it in the name of engagement and profit.

I see no reason to assume they won't do all of this again, and should they do it all again it's going to impact the entire Fediverse. Even if you just stick to instances that block Meta, if you're federating with instances that aren't, the toxic environment Meta is likely to build will come back to you. If the majority of instances fail to block them, I can't bear to stay here and watch what has become the internet's most healthy and vibrant community rot from the inside.

I honestly don't understand why this is even a debate. If even a fraction of the shit meta has pulled was done by a smaller Fediverse instance, we all wouldn't hesitate to defederate from them.

And to those of you who justify Threads because Meta is somehow the lesser of two evils compared to Twitter, please remember that while Twitter is owned by a raging and incompetent manchild, Meta has eroded democracies and played a major role in a genocide. Don't fucking support these murderers. Meta is more than happy to spread even more hatred and killing in the world if it boosts their profits.

I think it's absurd to give Meta the shadow of a benefit of the doubt. in the past, they have explicitly stated their intention to make facebook the internet. If zuck had his way, there would be exactly one website, a monolith collecting your data to more efficiently serve you ads. There is no world in which their participation in the fediverse is not self serving and a net loss for the rest of us.

What are you talking about?

If anyone does decide to leave lemmy.world, do not leave the lemmyverse. Join another lemmy instance or start your own instance. Lemmy is the future. Free, open source, federated link aggregator.

I'm getting sick of these "time to leave" posts about people wanting to jump ship on each sites decision. Beehaw decided they only want peaceful severs, time to leave. Lemmy.ml was founded by communists, time to leave! Lemmy.world doesn't instantly defederate from other instances, time to leave!

You can't just continually shuffle the community from site it site.

I believe the approach described in https://www.timothychambers.net/2023/07/03/instagram-threads-and.html is much more pragmatic than “Meta is bad, Threads will corrupt us” argument and I honestly believe that fighting among fedi instances would be the first win of EEE strategy. Meta IS bad, federation with Threads may be an opportunity, fighting before even watching and assessing the situation is wrong imho. “Watching Like a Hawk, with our Fingers Over the Block Button.”

All this talk of Meta is histrionics at this point until we find out if they are going to federate. Wait and see then you can decide what to do.

I understand both sides' points. At the end of the day, it's like going to your doctor. It's a personal decision whether you stay and wait this out, or feel an "icky" ping in your gut-- a familiar feeling that doesn't sit right with you. I've read these comments and it really all comes down to how and why you "internet."

Personally, I'm getting the icky, oh-god-here-we-go feeling because I worry about privacy. I've tried to learn what all of this means. The conclusion I've come to is that I enjoy the 3D (4D?) world much more. I will always seek these communities for reading and info... but the reality seems to be: People want to connect online. I think I just want to use it to pay bills, look up movie times, and eff off. Signing onto anything requires a risk that I must evaluate-- at least until my hand is forced. Like with paying bills, looking up movie times, shopping and so on.

I share the concerns of OP, but I love what someone on this post said. Something close to: If you think corporate America isn't coming for free space, you haven't been on Earth very long... (sorry, person who said this. I'm butchering your comment).

If you're getting the icky feeling, do something about it. I think we all are "internetting" for different reasons. We aren't all just going to run away in protest. I may or may not stay, but I will continue to my best to find the quiet places. If it becomes too much, I'll delete.

In a perfect world, it would be really nice to have a place online to be fun, free, and find reliable information in a quick and orderly fashion. So subscribing to the Fediverse means you will have to do some digging to find the communities you trust.

I think it's silly people are using arguments from pre-launch. If what I'm being told is true from what is being posted there, it's no doubt that it'll get defederated from most places fairly quickly. However, whether your instance federates with it or not will do nothing to address your concerns that are legitimate. You have nothing to fear from the algorithm or curation in any way. That won't affect you, federated or not. You also won't be drowned out either. That's not how federation works. Threads will dominate the narrative for a bit regardless of federation.

And your closing statement about "us" and "we" is culty and creepy. Don't speak for people you don't even know.

You want a server run by "one of you"? Run one yourself. You can do so for well under $100 a month (likely significantly lower depending on how snappy you want it).

I'm kind of tired of folks protesting against people hosting instances for others and entitled individuals making demands that they've done nothing to earn.

This has nothing to do with corporate. If you read what you linked, you'd know that full well. I'm guessing you didn't go more than that one link deep and didn't dive down to read the given reasons for the stance. Lazy.

This grand standing and these purity tests about threads are sickening.

We want to prevent enshittification. Not encourage it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with a wait-and-see approach.

As much as I preemptively created an account on another server (as I prefer admins to have a decisive stance in regards to Meta and similar corporations), it'd be good to wait for lemmy.world admins official message on it before telling everyone to leave.

But if they do "officially" bend the knee, yeah, it's time to leave if you want to avoid Meta.

Man.... I just got here.

I don't WANT to agree, but I kinda do.

We're here because Reddit was shit on top shit, led by gaping anus. We all accept that Meta is the same.
We didn't want Reddit profiting from our work. Meta will do the same, only more competently.

Defederation is useless at scale They can continually spin up new instances that act as spies and bridges to Meta's area.
Once enough Meta bridge nodes are woven into the Fedi, they'll be masked by a backchannel to mask the exchange/activity.

Someone plz tell me I'm wrong, but this is how I think things work in the background...

• Bob creates a Lemmy node - @Zucc1.ughfuckoff. It has 3 users and basically shops around until someone in lemmy.world's sphere allows federation. Zucc1 looks like any random, small instance.
• Once federated, Zucc1 syncs to its connected Lemmy instances - for now there is no Meta connection.
• Zucc1 can then federate with a bunch of other instances, including Zucc2.
• This repeats for a few weeks, infiltrating Fedi. This could be happening now.
• A new set of Lemmy nodes spin up and federate only with a portion of the spy instances. The spy instances don't respect the federation rules, distributing portions of the Fedi sync back to the Meta connected nodes, masking the source and destination.
• Once signed posts are received by the spy nodes, user names are swapped with a table synced by spy and bridge instances. @[email protected] becomes @[email protected].
  • The Threads user sees their message from @[email protected] (which can also be swapped if they worry Threads users care about any of this stuff).
  • The Lemmy user sees the message from @[email protected].

Probably easy to combat when it's one instance here and there. If it's constant and automated, federating would have to be paused until the spies are weeded out and there's a better detection strategy. If they get a big enough network going, they could all dip out at once, change identity, and refederate back in as the Fedi network flips out because of all the sync mismatches. Just more new nodes joining in. They have the source code, so they can act differently from other instances as long as it doesn't cause problems.

Is this a realistic scenario or am I way off base? I feel like it has to be one of the two.

It's all getting a bit Judean People's Front around here. I know there's a generally leftist userbase, but do we have to do this?

That's less about defederating with Meta. Meta are the Romans. It's about people defederating with anyone who federates with Meta.

I'm not on lemmy.world, but I've joined some communities that are. I think an important question is, for any community mods who take this stance, do you plan to shutter your lemmy.world community and move to another?

This situation is one reason why it's important to get tools for community migration into Lemmy. (Another is: what if an admin simply has to shut down their instance for personal reasons?)

(Also FWIW there's already reason to defederate based on the garbage moderation even if you're not concerned about EEE, so I don't get admins who are in "wait and see" mode.)

I'm not surprised, but disappointed. And I'm even tired to talk about it. It's just so fucking dumb.

Do the fosstodon people have a Lemmy instance?

Rather than make thread after thread after thread about it, just start an instance with blackjack and hookers and threads.net on your blocklist