this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023

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60% of Lemmy-instances blocks Threads.net (lemmy.sambands.net)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

45 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Based on data from https://fedipact.veganism.social/ it seems that the majority of instances blocks threads.net. I'm sure there's Lemmy instances with either approach that have slipped through the cracks as the list is a work in progress.

The percentage of users doesn't correlate to instances as the biggest instance on the Lemmyverse has roughly 3x the users of the second largest, a NSFW instance, 4x the users of the biggest "niché" instance and 5x the users of what I see as the second largest general purpose instance.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Now if only lemmy.world would follow.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

Let's block them too lmao 🤣🤣🤭

[+] [email protected] -12 points 10 months ago (5 children)

I hope not. I know this is controversial but there’s literally no benefit from defederating. People can simply block threads at a personal level if they want.

Even if you do, everything on Lemmy is public so you gain no privacy advantage by blocking it. The only thing you might prevent is a reduction in content quality, but again, if that bothers you just block the instance yourself.

This is a classic kneejerk reaction where people are trying to prevent a hypothetical harm before it has even proven to be a problem.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There might be no benefit to you but the people who would be the direct targets of every hate group like LibsOfTikTok currently active on Threads probably feel a bit differently.

This is in no way a knee-jerk reaction to a hypothetical alarm. Meta have directly contributed to a genocide and allow hate groups to grow unchecked on Threads. It blows my mind that the fediverse - itself built as a series of alternatives to shitty companies doing shitty things - thinks the harm Meta will do is hypothetical and unproven.

The benefits to not federating are many, but the best one, in my opinion, is not exposing current fediverse users who will be targeted to those who will target them.

[+] [email protected] -12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

And that’s why you can personally block it like any other instance in your settings. It’s no different than blocking a lemmy instance that also harbors those exact same kind of people.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Blocking them as a user is not the same. Your content can still get to them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

At the moment, Threads runs from one domain. Do you seriously think it's going to stay that way? They also have 100 million users, compared to less than 2 million across the entire fediverse. Once Threads gets serious about federation - maybe a year or two from now - what you're suggesting is going to be like constant whack-a-mole. That's in no way a fun prospect.

And even if they stick with one domain (which they won't) - the hate groups on Threads will still be producing content that other fediverse users will be talking about/linking to/quoting etc. The fediverse is very quickly going to become a miserable place to be for those who thought they had found a place where they could be free of all that harassment.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Mastodon, which has far more users than lemmy, implements "authorized fetch", which can actually affect whether Meta can just crawl it.

I know we're on lemmy, but it's not the case that anything on ActivityPub is necessarily fully public, or that instance-level blocking is identical to user blocking.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

You’ve only made the case to implement authorized fetch on lemmy. Mastodon did it, Pixelfed did it. No reason why lemmy cannot do it.

edit:

To be clear, I don’t give a rat’s ass what lemmy instance admins do in this matter. Threads interaction is more compatible with mastodon and pixelfed anyway. I just think the chicken little act is ridiculous when bad actors of concern are definitely already here. You’re not stopping anything from coming in. This place isn’t untainted like freshly fallen snow. It’s a pool that gets peed in on a regular basis.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Yes, lemmy should do that.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I can tell you one benefit: Money. Most of my server's costs come from storing federated content. Federating with threads would likely be expensive.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

As an instance admin it seems incredibly irresponsible to allow my server to spoon feed Meta my users data and activity through federation.

And Meta proved many, many times that they are utterly untrustworthy.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

You should read this. https://erinkissane.com/untangling-threads

By federating your instance to Threads, you are providing more content to Meta for them to place ads next to, supporting a network that allows abuse orgs like Libs of TikTok with limited moderation.

Consider this scenario: LoT sees a post you made on Lemmy. They select you as a random target of hate, as they did hundreds of people at the beginning of this year.

Their followers start going after you, but you don't know it because you block them. It turns to real life harassment.

This is a real issue, one of many.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Honestly, even if I agree in principle, the fediverse has exhausted any sympathy from me given that there's consistent toxicity towards people who don't "get it", people who aren't open-source tech nerds or fediverse evangelists. There's this constant smugness that the fediverse and its community is better than everything else and it has no problems or the problems that do exist is how the fediverse should work. No, not everyone is like that, but the ones that are make the fediverse experience that much more painful and I'd rather just use Bluesky, even though it's janky and much more limited in features.

Not even talking about Threads, either. I think this issue is quite prevalent on Lemmy but I remember Technology Connections having this issue on the Mastodon side to the point where he got angry too.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 10 months ago (4 children)

It's interesting that Mastodon instances are trending in the opposite direction of Lemmy instances. Most are staying federated with Threads. I wonder if that's simply indicative of the strong anti-corporate culture on Lemmy, or if there's more to it.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Maybe that and the creator of Mastodon actively rolling out the red carpet for Zuck

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yep. Meta's convinced him that this is a huge victory for Mastodon -- and a good way for him to achieve his goal of getting Mastodon to 100,000,000 users.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

It's also because Mastodon has a different structure. While Lemmy tries to mimic Reddits structure with individual communities, Mastodon follows Twitters structure as a larger hub more.

Mastodon, being less "subdivided" therefore can afford federation with such an entity with less risk. Their collective mass being able to offset threads weight more, in comparison to Lemmy where each community has to compete individually with Threads.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's also interesting that nobody's asking "how is Threads federating with Mastodon/Lemmy?" All the focus is on the underdog but shouldn't we pull our heads out of the bubble and give some attention to what the big dog is doing?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

They're probably using ActivityPub?

[–] [email protected] -4 points 10 months ago

They're just stupid.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Someone posted this in another thread and the stats are genuinely misleading here. All the super large instances are federating with Meta, with like 90% of the users.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'd be happy to update it with more correct information if you can find more accurate numbers.

From https://fedipact.veganism.social/ the largest instances in order of active users are:

Lemmy.world - Federates
LemmyNSFW.com - Blocks
Lemmy-ml - Blocks
Lemm.ee - Blocks
programming.dev - Federates.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

They are probably mean including mastodon, which is larger and generally federates with threads

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

With how bad Lemmy federates across other platforms, even those still federating won’t be seen on Threads lol

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

And mine is one of them

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Is kbin.social still going to federate?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I hope so. Preemptive defederation is a stupid idea.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

First as tragedy, then as ~~farce~~ kbin.social

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

OOTL - why is everyone blocking threads.net?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's owned by Meta, the company that runs Facebook. If you're still unsure about the situation perhaps this can help out: https://erinkissane.com/untangling-threads

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago

And the crux of the matter:

Less emotionally, I think it’s unwise to assume that an organization that has…

demonstrably and continuously made antisocial and sometimes deadly choices on behalf of billions of human beings and

allowed its products to be weaponized by covert state-level operations behind multiple genocides and hundreds (thousands? tens of thousands?) of smaller persecutions, all while

ducking meaningful oversight,

lying about what they do and know, and

treating their core extraction machines as fait-accompli inevitabilities that mustn’t be governed except in patently ineffective ways…

…will be a good citizen after adopting a new, interoperable technical structure.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

This is the way i see the situation:

Letting meta join the fediverse means they will captivate the general audience and the fediverse will stop growing. Realizing this, it could lead a lot of contributors to the lemmy/mastodon/activitypub projects lose interest, which will slow down development and could eventually lead to the death of the fediverse project.

This is how it goes:

People get accustomed to all the content from Meta/Threads

Meta adds extra features to their website which do not work with other fediverse instances

People switch from lemmy/mastodon to threads or join threads directly and never ever consider joining the real fediverse.

The fediverse project either dies down or remains a niche project forever.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (6 children)

But why?

[–] [email protected] 60 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Don't want a single inch of corpo tendrils winding their way into my new space

[–] [email protected] 47 points 10 months ago

If someone's punched you in the face and robbed you blind the last 15 times you invited them over, do you think the 16th time is gonna be different?

[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago

Meta is poison.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

Because the point of federation is the choice, no?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html