this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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Server indexes of places for newcomers to join can be instrumental for Fediverse adoption. However, sudden rule changes can leave some admins feeling pressure to change policies in order to remain listed.

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[–] [email protected] 160 points 7 months ago (50 children)

I cannot see anything bad here. Blocking an actively malicious actor should be the norm.

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 7 months ago (20 children)

the one reason I joined the instance Lemm.ee was because its mission was to avoid defederating and be the widest firehose nozzle of lemmy content available.

even i would prefer for lemm.ee to defederate threads.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 7 months ago (10 children)

Meta: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/, https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1320040111, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039

Instance admins: Let's give them a chance guyyyyss!!

Those of you who think the problem is data scraping or whatever are totally missing the point. All profit-motivated social media platforms engage in promoting hate content for engagement, and in doing so have deadly real world consequences. The Fediverse is one of the few online spaces where people can just be themselves naturally without being manipulated by algorithms. Given their history, there's no reason to assume Threads won't be any better about handling their own community, and anything that happens with them will affect the rest of us.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (18 children)

for real. im new to lemmy but places like hexbear seem really good for trans stuff. i hate how so many trans places are dependent upon facebook or reddit to exist. facebook itself is problematic because those fuckers already assisted a genocide in myanmar, whats to stop them from helping to massacre trans people here?

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 7 months ago

A community index of servers added a new rule recently, that requires every participant to defederate from Threads.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (23 children)

Maybe I'm naive but I kinda don't get it. People talk about defederating as if...what, all Meta IP addresses will be magically blocked from scraping your content? Any script kiddie can harvest Lemmy/Mastodon/whatever content.

Has Meta shown itself to be a bad actor? Yes. Should my email provider block all emails from Meta? Well...that's a bit much I think? If Facebook email still existed, should my email provider block that?

My point is yes, Meta bad, but all Thread users also bad? I thought


and apparently I'm very wrong here


that the Federation paradigm was kinda like email. And the only email I want blocked is a domain where every single user is malicious, not a domain run by a malicious entity which has normal people as users, who aren't necessarily very tech literate.

I don't actually care, but I just find it a little confusing tbh.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 7 months ago (5 children)

@qjkxbmwvz I think the main fear is Embrace Extend Extinguish.

It's not about interacting with Threadworms, it's about sleepwalking into a situation where Meta is changing the very nature of ActivityPub itself.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 7 months ago

Threads exists for the sole purpose of capturing some of the people showing interest in the fediverse as twitter dies and keeping them in the facebook ecosystem. Once it believes it has exhausted this window of opportunity it will defederate just as it de-federated it's xmmp based messenger service once it thought it had the upperhand.

Every server that defederates from meta preemptively is working to build a resilient community that will survive this inevitable scenario. Every server that federates with meta will become dependent on it then collapse as their users leave to join threads once that becomes their only option to continue interacting with the threads users that their social experience was built on.

Your post only concerns threats to an individual user re scraping or malicious interactions. The threat meta poses to the fediverse is systemic. In the long run the meta-blocking servers are the fediverse. The meta-federating servers might see some short term attention but in the long run will have the same fate as those that hitched their wagons to the metaverse.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I dont care if they scrape my comments I just wouldnt want to see sneaky "promoted" posts aka ads and I enjoy the idea of boycotting facebook.

Ultimately the decision is for the instances owners and admins to make, not ours. I will just migrate to one that doesnt federate with facebook if I have to.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (4 children)

I just wouldnt want to see sneaky “promoted” posts aka ads

I don't quite see how that would even work. Those posts would need to be coming from individual users rather than from Facebook itself and you can just block those users. Facebook can display ads in between posts on their own app but those wont be visible to people using other apps.

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

Here's one scenario.

  1. Facebook feeds its users content according to an algorithm.

  2. Facebook and lemmy users can interact with the same user content (liking, commenting).

  3. There are vastly more Facebook users than lemmy users.

  4. By dint of Facebook's greater number of users, lemmy users will see the most popular content that is fed algorithmically to Facebook users.

Conclusion: lemmy users are being fed content by the Facebook algorithm (in this still, thankfully hypothetical, scenario).

Like imagine Facebook promotes some viral post and it gets a thousands of upvotes. Any lemmy user on a federated instance, sorting by upvotes/hot/etc, is going to see that post.

That's the kind of top-down reach that is so alien to the fedi

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

And the only email I want blocked is a domain where every single user is malicious, not a domain run by a malicious entity which has normal people as users, who aren’t necessarily very tech literate.

You'll never get the tech iliterate people to switch to the rest of the Fediverse otherwise. Defederating Threads is about making it as bad as possible for its users - it's about hurting Meta and stemming its bad influence on the web.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

It's not about looking what's happening in the garden, it's about entering in the garden. It's two very different situations.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

I agree, and I predict people will eventually pick instances that are doing what you suggested.

My understanding is that the defederation is to prevent MetaFacebook from getting to a point where they control the entire thing and then destroy it.

I don't think defederating is the right move for that, but it's a move

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago

the crochet(?) veggies are adorable

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

common Fedi Garden W

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

Sean, I think your article is missing the most important section: alternatives to Fedi Garden.

Can you at least list a few at the end of the article?

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