What should we do about Threads?
What should we do about Threads?
A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.
However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don't have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.
What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it'd be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.
What actions can we take to deal with Threads?
Join the pact and not just vow but actually do defederate Threads as soon as it comes online: https://fedipact.online/
Meh, federated or defederated, threads poses only the first challenge to the fediverse. There will be other players with their own incentives that will join via ActivityPub, add their own custom features incompatible with the broader world, and entice users with slicker interfaces. Fediverse will need to show it can weather it, especially hard with the network effects of the larger corporations' user bases.
My hope is the pressure will keep open services innovating to better compete and result in a richer experience for everyone.
Absolutely defederate from threads immediately from anything threads related.
Threads will collect any and all data they can about users disregarding which server you are on, and not agreeing to their business practices.
There's a reason they are not in the EU, including NI despite being in UK. And that's probably because their practices are illegal, and don't respect the rights of their users according to EU regulation.
The second Lemmy federates with Threads, I'm out of here.
Some food for thought from Mastodon:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
How so many people seem to brush this off is beyond me. As far as I'm concerned the purpose of federated, decentralized services is being in charge of who to trust and huge corporations not controlling or monitoring every part of your online activity.
Obviously as soon as Meta starts dealing with ActivityPub and Fediverse, the overwhelming majority of users will flock to their servers. They will be more userfriendly and responsive. In effect they will also hold the overwhelming majority of content and data. Just a matter of time till most of the other instances will become obsolete, due to bandwith regulations or smth similar,
The fediverse will be rebranded as the "Threadiverse"
Just: We absolutely must wall off Meta.
I think we should defederate any corp version of any federated app. Not due to privacy or anything, but because it silos anyone using those services from everyone else. Bluntly, I don't want people's B.S. propeganda on the fediverse, and the stupid crap conspiracy farm that Facebook and other places have become.
I'm sure it won't stop the stupid from reaching us, but it should limit the amount and impact that those users have. Additionally, it will remove a lot of high quality content from those services making them less viable for corps to run and maintain. They will happily farm the fediverse for content to attract users they can monitize.... I'm not a fan of handing them more content to steal while they share zero of the profits of that content with either the creators or the communities that handle that data.
I'm not doing their job for them in promoting entertaining and informative posts just so they can make money on it. They want it, they can put forth the effort themselves.
Push celebrities, influencers, and businesses to create their own instances, outside of Meta.
If they just use a Threads account, then the Fediverse gets made irrelevant. Along come the Three E's, and Meta walls up the garden and starts putting billboards up everywhere.
Celebrities, influencers, & businesses need to know that they can now have a social media presence that they own, rather than rent, where they can make the rules for the communities they host. It's good for them in that it keeps their Fediverse presence theirs, they get to call the shots and choose how their instance is set up.
Because if enough people have a strong Fediverse presence outside of Threads land, it'll make it much harder for Meta to pull the plug.
In my opinion, the people that use Instagram and will potentially use Threads aren't the ones who will get into the Fediverse.
They will probably not even know that this exists in the app as it just puts you directly in threads.net.
Also, there's the option that this is just a 'trend thing' that will die in a week or two, probably because people won't get used to or due to legal problems (as it's already happening).
I was recently asked by my employer if we should move our social media efforts to fediverse and my recommendation was that this community it's both too small and also would be hostile (rightly) to corporate empty posting.
As soon as threads has a web interface that's usable I will be starting up there...
You put your recycling in the blue can, compost in the green can and your corporate garbage on Meta.
I want nothing to do with meta or facebook.
If this gets serious I'm out of here as fast as I dumped reddit.
~tildes it is.
I feel like the EEE attack is inevitable at this point.
Why else would they even be willing to federate?
They saw the threat that decentralized non-profit social media is and want to kill it before it has a chance.
All Lemmy servers and especially the largest ones need to defederate from it immediately.
Drop that trash
There's really no imminent threat with Meta and ActivityPub, as a standard.
As for Threads and Mastodon, the "threat" is mild. If Meta wants your data, they can get it without spinning up an entire social network. If the concern is that it's going to lower the quality of the content, well, there's probably some truth to that, but that would happen with popularity, regardless of which service became popular, and it's a problem solved by the block function.
I will leave and block any instance that federates with Meta, including this one, and go start my own instance, and only federate with others that also block it if I have to. Don't you dare allow their corporate garbage into our space 😠
As the fediverse grows, there will inevitably be more centralized instances. Every big tech corp may want to start their own instance, similar to how most tech corps provide their own mail services.
There are millions of email service providers, but Gmail and Outlook are synonymous to email for a large amount of people.
Defederating with Meta and Tumblr is like Protonmail blocking every mail from Gmail. You just cripple yourself and make your instance useless.
Threads doesn't need to do an EEE attack. They've already gained many more users than the entire Fediverse. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to not join the Fediverse at all.
I would never use Threads, but I would use a Mastodon instance that federated with Threads. I already see many journalists and content creators I like trying it out, who either stopped using Mastadon long ago or never even tried it in the first place. If Threads started doing things that negatively affected my experience, I would then switch to a Mastodon instance that wasn't federated with Threads.
In my opinion, nothing. If Meta is able to effectively take over Fediverse as people are claiming, then the Fediverse was never destined to survive to begin with. On to the next thing. This is the first real test of the resilience of this type of “decentralized social network”, and if it ends up going to shit, it would have eventually anyway.
I have already blocked threads on my household instance. I decided that I don't want to have to trust major instance admins to take the same things seriously that I do.
I run my own instance and am defederating immediately (whenever they start federating). I did also join the pact.
I'll evaluate their impact a month or so in and decide whether or not to refederate.I acknowledge there's potential for a positive impact here, so I will give them a chance.
Fuck em. Burn this place to the ground before we dance with the devil.
we shouldn't do anything.
Isn't the whole promise of the fediverse that whatever the policies of one instance are, that doesn't necessarily affect all the other instances, and each can do their own thing. If an instance doesn't want to accept traffic from threads, good for them. But to try to organize a fediverse-wide response to threads seems a whole lot like the centralization the fediverse is supposed to not be.
Another vote to defederate here.
threads will never federate.
We need to be able to block it ourselves. As far as I know, and I am very new to this, we can block communities, but not servers. I want to be able to block servers, the whole point of having a social network is to be able to communicate with people and if you can't prune bots, bad actors, blood sucking vampires like Stephen Miller, and Meta, the pseudonym for Evil Corp, then they are free to derail and poison community engagement in every conversation. The job of pruning becomes too overwhelming if I have to try to keep track of all the communities coming out of threads, or any other corp that could poison those interactions. I need the control to do it myself, while others who disagree with me can suckle on the corporate teet if they so wish. ,, here's 2 more commas for you,
Same thing we do about reddit. They are free to do their own thing in their own corner as long as they don't bring us into it.
Don't use it.
I say we should just let Threads fail through its own doing.
"Should 'we' do?"
Nothing. If people and/or communities coming in through Threads are engaging in good faith, cool, more nice folks to have a community with. People/communities engaging in bad faith get blocked/defederated as is already common practice (and seems to be working outstandingly already, looking at average quality of posts and discourse "here" as compared to the "big platforms").
When Meta/Threads is hosting communities I like to see/be a part of, I'll figure out how to subscribe/integrate those. Besides that, they're free and welcome to run echo chambers in their own instances and communities, I don't see how any of that would ever show up on my feed.
Can Lemmy.world go read-only? I think the biggest threat that can actually be handled is a bunch of shitty Facebook users making shitty, angry comments in lemmy.world threads. letting Threads read and display Lemmy.world content, but not comment would solve this.
There are other important threats from Facebook, but this one can actually be solved.
I’m hoping further EU legislation can hinder those goat guzzlers
In order to compete in user experience we need to up our game. We need to set up communities which collect, categorize and funnel user requests upstream. These features should be focused on:
- reducing frictions like unclear UI, broken links, etc.
- improving usability of the various web frontends (the one from Lemmy, kbin, etc.)
- collecting bug reports and making sure they will be fixed
This is meant to be a proxy between average users and tech enthusiasts who know how to do pull requests or open GitHub issues. Moderators of these communities would do it for them. This would enable us to gain visibility in the needs of the users.
This is only a part of what needs to be done, but I think this can be done quickly.
Don't worry. Elon's gonna sue and Zuck will quietly shut Threads down. /s
I've been reading blog posts taking various positions and remain undecided.
Threats is a better name for that data collecting pos.
@SDF@lemmy.sdf.org Would love to know from you, what do you plan to do?
What is the SDF's current attitude to Threads?
I'm somewhat undecided here, because ultimately I don't care for federated services to become dominant at all costs, nor do I care if they shrink slightly. I want the users of these services to voluntarily choose them based on the principles that federated social media stands for right now. My personal opinion right now is let them federate, but defederate the minute the "extend" starts. But we'll see.
I welcome the extra content and massive expansion of the fediverse! Having millions of users has its advantages. Smaller communities will still exist.
Everyone on knows about EEE at this point; it's mentioned in every other post haha
The dev behind Mastodon doesn't seem concerned. Why are you?
What worries me most is how this has shown me how how wildly insecurely ActivityPub seems to be storing and sharing user data.
I dint understand anything you guys are talking about here. Fediverse? Are we ralking about the collection of sublemmys?
I thought Threads joining the fediverse was a GOOD thing, and even the Mastodon Org seems cool with this. More users = better.
Wanting to block Threads does nothing to Meta, and only hurts users. It would be like blocking all email from Gmail because you know they read your messages to generate targeted ads. You wouldn't be teaching Google a lesson, just hindering interoperability between people.
The EEE argument is a red herring at the moment. Sure, in the future, Meta and others could get clever in ways we can't imagine right now, but currently it's a "sky is falling" kind of threat. As it currently stands, the path from Threads launching to "Meta killing the fediverse" has all the logical progression as the Underpants Gnomes.