this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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I’m kind of stupid and more here just because it tends to be better discussion than Reddit: what does “federate with” mean in this context??
Thanks!
@Minotaur @henfredemars @technology You are using an account on lemm.ee to reply to someone commenting from an account on infosec.pub in a community hosted on lemmy.world.
Those are all running Lemmy software, but I am replying from an account on social.goodanser.com, which is running Mastodon software.
That's federation. We're all using different service providers, sometimes even different software, but we can talk to each other because they speak the same protocol, called ActivityPub. Threads.net has announced plans to support ActivityPub and conducted some limited trials, which they're in the process of expanding. They claim they intend to support it fully, but only for users who opt in to it.
Servers can block, or "defederate from" other servers, and many have chosen to preemptively defederate from Threads.
Very interesting. Appreciate the response. Didn’t know big companies like meta had any interest in the whole “federation” gig, seeing that it seems a little “opposed” to the kind of big revenue that supports tech companies like that
And now I'm commenting from a lemmy.world account because Lemmy from Mastodon has some rough edges like the need to tag the community in my comment above to ensure it actually reaches the lemmy.world server.
Tumblr and Flickr are also talking about ActivityPub support, but it's not clear if or when that will actually happen. It would make more sense to me for those services since they're fairly small and it's a way to substantially increase the possible audience. It's not clear what Meta's motivations are here, though a motivation some have proposed is that they're trying to get in front of potential regulation. The EU Digital Markets Act, for example requires some services to interoperate with competitors, and having one of its new products join an established standard protocol is a way to say "you don't need to regulate us, we already do the thing".
I don't think their blocking of comments mentioning Pixelfed is intentional. Pixelfed is not popular enough for Meta to care about as a competitor, and blocking mentions of competitors has never been among their tactics.
Youtube was blocking comments mentioning Fediverse and ActivityPub 2 years ago way before all the exposure the Fediverse got last year. Facebook was blocking links to mastodon instances also before all that. There is absolutely no way a very specific word such as Pixelfed would be blocked "accidentally", how do you propose such accidental block would even be possible? Oops, intern smashed his butt against a keyboard and set a filter that happened to catch Pixelfed by accident? Come on.
Appreciate this response, it seems to make a lot of sense to me.
I think people on sites like Lemmy and similar can kind of uhh… overestimate how much anyone outside of a very niche crowd care about the whole “federalization” movement, and yeah it seems unlikely to me that Threads is going out of its way to shadowban a (comparatively) niche competitor like Pixelfed
I'm about 99% sure Threads uses automated spam/abuse filtering based on uncommon words present in posts that have recently been flagged as abusive. Somebody, perhaps several somebodies probably posted "follow my porn account on Pixelfed" or similar that Threads doesn't like. I'd use something like that if I was making a huge social media thing because you can't not at that scale.
That's exactly why Threads is incompatible with the Fediverse. Any huge server that is impossible to moderate for admins is detrimental to the network and failure to properly moderate is the number one reason we should be looking at to defederate from instances.
Automatic "spam" protection is the exact thing which co-opted e-mail. Big corps with the largest e-mail user base use algorithms that automatically assume the worst about any small e-mail server. If you spin up a small server you are assumed to be spam unless unless unless, which ended up with e-mail being centralized in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple, despite being theoretically decentralized too.
Is that what we want for the Fediverse? 4 or 5 huge instances automatically defederating from all small instances unless they fit some criteria defined by the big corps, which they can change anytime?
That is the goal here. Bookmark this comment and !remindme in 5 years.
You need more training in corporate risk management, grasshopper! AP/AtProto isn't a revenue opportunity, it's a potential front for which they'll need to have a battle-ready product and brand. Ever heard the saying 'engagement is containment'?
But it actually isn't, because the largest driver of growth for platforms like facebook & instagram is the already present userbase.
That userbase will always be there if the programs are all federated together, so creating a new platform is now just making a better site versus that and bringing in the userbase.
Wait did I miss something big? Does Lemmy now federate with Mastodon somehow? How does that work?
Always has. Anything using ActivittPub can interoperate
I was under the impression that it theoretically could but wasn’t set up in a way that made this possible. But perhaps I was mistaken.
How do I access Mastodon content using my account here then?
Threads hasn't had federation enabled until now, but you've always been able to interact with Mastodon... sort of. The Lemmy UI doesn't really have a good way of finding Mastodon posts that don't tag a Lemmy community or of following Mastodon users, but if they do tag a community the Mastodon post will show up as a Lemmy post in that community.
I see. So functionally it doesn’t really work, at least in this direction.
You've had some well-meaning but ultimately not quite accurate answers in this thread so just to clarify:
You can follow, post to and interact with Lemmy communities from Mastodon, because they're treated the same way as a "group" on Mastodon in general.
You can NOT follow and interact with Mastodon users from Lemmy, because Mastodon accounts are individual "users" and Lemmy doesn't have the concept of following and interacting with users, only with communities. If Lemmy ever does add a feature to let us follow other users, then in theory following Mastodon users will also become possible.
You can't use mastodon from Lemmy, but you can from some threadiverse software like Kbin.
@LibertyLizard @technology It always has. They both speak ActivityPub.
The UX can be awkward though. As an example, I had to add the community tag to this comment manually, as it won't federate to lemmy.world otherwise. That's because Mastodon doesn't push replies to every server with users participating in a thread, which I think is a design flaw.
To post to Lemmy from Mastodon, just tag a community. You can load any of the fediverse links shown in the default Lemmy web UI in a Mastodon search box and reply to them. You can also follow a community and receive every subsequent post and comment as a boost (this is a bad UX and I don't recommend it), as well as follow Lemmy users, which you can't do in Lemmy itself. You cannot vote on Lemmy posts/comments from Mastodon.
I find tagging an appropriate Lemmy community from my Mastodon posts to be a good experience. You'll see a few of those from my @zaktakespictures account in @birding, and from @zakreviews in @flashlight.
I'm pretty sure Lemmy won't make new toplevel posts out of this in those communities since it's a reply, but I'm going to check just to be sure.
Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: [email protected], [email protected]
As far as I know it's always been this way. At least since I joined during the whole reddit fiasco
How do you access Mastodon content in Lemmy?
It doesn't work so well in that direction. Lemmy doesn't have a concept of content that isn't posted to a community. If a Mastodon post tags a Lemmy community, it's available as a normal Lemmy post, but otherwise it doesn't exist.
FWIW I think this is intentional and a feature, not a bug. By spreading content to communities, you can delegate moderation responsibility much easier.
Content not posted to any community would need something akin to a site-wide moderator or an admin to moderate, and such a moderator wouldn't be as effective. They'd cover a wider array of very different content. Community moderators work better because they can define rules that are only confined to their comm and they know better how to moderate their own community and they also care more about their own community so are more motivated to keep it well-moderated in the fashion they want.
I didn't fully understand what I was talking about when I replied, and for that I apologize. Now that I know a little bit more, this is basically how it works (I think):
We cannot see posts made directly on Mastodon. However, they can see posts made on Lemmy and even comment on them. We are able to see those comments as normal and without doing anything on our end, but again, that's only as long as they're made under Lemmy posts