Threads has begun testing federation over ActivityPub. And they have blocked two important servers I administrate. The first server is the Mostr Bridge. The Mostr Bridge connects ActivityPub and Nostr together, so people can communicate across protocols. The second server is Spinster.xyz, which is a...
The author complaining about Threads defederation from spinster was a pretty big red flag. It's on every mainstream mastodon blocklist I've seen and it's obvious he knows why. Really leaned into that "how can they discriminate against women!?" dog whistle that TERFs love to use.
Edit: Oh, it turns out he's married to the person who runs that server. He's also worked with Gab, used some of their code for his soapbox, and seems to have been involved with Trump's truth social. No wonder his feelings are hurt.
Kind of incredible that he would take the stereotypes of the male feminist and the vegan, add in a heaping dose of a persecution complex, and yet somehow tolerate infinite vitriol from the sort of people who believe that he, as the possessor of male genitals, is literally, genuinely inferior to those born without.
I'm inclined to believe you on both points simply because I know lw blocks both of those platforms, but I don't know much about Gleason or spinster. It's billed as a "feminist platform", what's bad about it?
I disagree with your opinion of the integration with Threads, but I agree with you that it should be up to the individual instances and/or users.
Meta is a horrible company and I want nothing to do with them, but the whole point of the fediverse is that it’s decentralized. Anyone can spin up an instance if Lemmy or Mastodon and choose what other instances they federate with. If we were to somehow ban Meta’s instances, we create a pretty sketchy precedent.
Tl;Dr: The most hateful and problematic instances that exist were wisely blocked by Meta, and the admins have found a workaround that lets them see Threads posts, but doesn't let Threads users see their posts.
Therefore, I am a proponent that Threads should not block any servers at all, unless the server itself is behaving badly from a technical standpoint. They should moderate every user on an individual level, regardless of which server they're on, using the extensive moderation tools at their disposal.
Haha, no. There are certainly good reasons to block entire servers when their userbase is horrible. A theoretical* instance that is based on hate speech doesn't need to have each individual member vetted when the server itself is a terrible concept. A server that actively promotes brigading would also be worthy of defederating without needing to spend time reviewing each individual account.
Where the line would be drawn will vary based on opinions, but the free speech absolutist idea that banning entire servers is always wrong is just plain stupid.
*Theoretical because I don't know of an example off the top of my head even though one or more most likely exists.
I think lemmygrad.ml is known for brigading. As for actual hate speech I think the instance this article is talking about is transphobic based on what others have said in this comment section.
Meta is blocking Nazis... oh wait, I get it.
This is a PR stunt to show the gullibles in the fediverse how much M(ark)eta has "changed." Sure, there might be a historical shift of right wing populism everywhere because of Meta's content regulatory practices but they've changed guys. C'mon.
Funny, there was a thread a few days back where people were raging about Meta being able to "harvest" the data they were posting in public on the Fediverse, and one of the ways people were insisting that Meta could be stopped was with "authorized fetch." That's exactly what Meta is apparently using in this case to block those servers, and which has been trivially worked around.
Public data is public, any attempt to make it conditionally public is just going down the DRM dead-end.
The problems have to do with people not liking Meta. I'm getting an increasingly strong feeling that the goalposts shall be placed wherever they are needed.
Which I suppose explains the tonal whiplash of going from people raging that not enough people were defederating from Meta to raging that Meta is defederating from the usual suspects in less time than it took to get through the Christmas leftovers.
Not that I particularly like Meta. All social media was a mistake, if you ask me. But still.
I find it interesting that Meta Platforms, Inc., a company known for harvesting user data, is blocking some servers from fetching its public posts. They decided to implement a feature Mastodon calls Authorized fetch.
This was always going to happen. They will block agressively, because they can't have their precious advertising money mixed with CSAM, nazis and other illegal content. And the fedi is full of that.
There's far less because of server blocks. There are tons of gross servers that are just walled off from everyone else. Mastodon.social blocks a couple hundred servers.
Every now and then someone will write an article like, 'I love free speech so I thought I could run a Mastodon server without blocking anyone... boy was I ever wrong.' There's some truly vile shit out there.
Meta has well over two billion users. The vast majority of them are ordinary people who should be welcomed onto the fediverse. Yes, any network that big has problematic people... but they can be dealt with.