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Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 25 points 2 years ago (49 children)

Pretty cool. I keep saying that this is a win for open standards and Meta probably does this to appease EU regulators. It's no surprise that this happens as Threads launches In Europe.

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  • [–] 36 points 2 years ago (38 children)

    Yep, can't wait to be able to personally defederate from them, I hope that option comes soon.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    I see it as an opportunity to tell people on Threads to leave Threads and use an open platform, such as Mastodon, instead. Then eventually Threads will shut down, because everyone moved :D

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    Won't they have control over their instance though? I'm sure they're going to run it like Reddit and shadow ban the shit out of their users and also not let them see certain stuff.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    Far more likely to lean on their infrastructure advantage and add things like image and video hosting on-platform that the Fediverse can't do now.

    Then once secured, they can defederate from the actual fediverse and take the whole thing private.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    You mean as instance blocking? Because the Lemmy devs have stated that it's not going to work the way everybody's assuming it's going to work.

    So far the way that it's been laid out it'll only block communities on that Lemmy Instance, users will not be filtered.

    That's ignoring the fact that Lemmy's blocking system is already flawed in it's design and isn't really an effective tool against malicious users.

    So we really shouldn't treat blocking even of instances as personal defederation, because it isn't and unless something really changes and Lemmy's development it never will be. You can on Mastodon because Mastodon's blocking system is much harsher as well as the fact that federation highly depends on following, but lemmy works much differently and also has a significantly weaker blocking system (I should also add it does not respect mastodon's blocking system) so because of that being able to block instances should not and cannot be considered an alternative to defederation, especially when it comes to malicious instances.

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  • [+] -10 points 2 years ago (30 children)

    Why would you want to defederate at all? It’s akin to hiding your head in the sand, except done on a community-wide scale. Just because you can’t see the nazi over there in the bushes doesn’t mean he isn’t squatting there, observing you.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Read this for an idea as to why people are against letting Meta federate: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

    It's not a cut and dry yes or no for me.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I might be looking at this wrong, so please let me know why if I am, but I don't understand the argument that Google killed XMPP. The protocol existed before Google and still existed after Google. I assume the number of people using the XMPP protocol before Google implemented it was small. Then for a little while, Google added all of their users into the network who could now message all the "pure" XMPP users who were already there. After that though, when Google left the protocol and took all its users that weren't using XMPP before then anyway, how did that kill it? Would you not still have the same group of XMPP users who were there before Google? Anyone you could chat with before you could still chat with now.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    XMPP was very popular. Google joined it, and with it, the power to give it's users on Gmail access to all the other chat products that all had more chat users by sharing the same XMPP space. Users were very happy to use the superior Gmail product and also let go of their old chat tools because they could still talk to everyone just fine!

    Google waited until they had most of the users and simply started making non compatible changes to their chat until they finally defederated themselves and suddenly their users could no longer chat with anyone who wasn't also on Google.

    People noticed, but most of the users were no longer willing to drop their now-familiar gchat client because they were now used to it. Users like me who wanted to use Pidgin still were suddenly unable to chat with 80% of their friends unless they gave in and opened up gchat too.

    If Google never federated with the system, we might still likely have aim, msn, etc still around focusing on their chat users. But Google did their thing, stole the market and we're where we're at now. Ironically, most people I know now disable Google chat because Google has tried really hard to ruin something that was just fine. But no one is installing Pidgin again and have mostly moved to Discord and Slack (at least in my circles).

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    is facebook

    why wouldn’t you want to defederate

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    bc there's people on the other side :)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    They certainly have the choice to migrate. If they don't want to it's their problem. Fediverse wasn't meant to be a wide open connect with anyone anywhere unconditionally network, if you want that go to Nostr (it's filled with Right wing trolls and crypto/nft bros for that very reason). It's meant to allow for instances to communicate and share content while still being run independently of one another. That also includes the ability to block other servers.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago*

    Obviously we will have to see what sort of content comes in from Threads, but knowing Meta, they will be serving a lot of ads in it. So instances will effectively be distributing Meta ads for free. Well free for Meta; the instances will incur additional costs.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (14 children)

    He already is, this is all open? They will include people's numbers in their "awesome wave of the future" and I don't want that. The more people ignore them and isolate them, the more they won't have power over everyone.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (13 children)

    What are “people’s numbers”? What power would they have if we didn’t defederate?

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (11 children)

    Dude, facebook is evil, we all know that. I have no idea how they plan to take over the fediverse, but they're planning it. Do you remember when they first announced and then everyone suddenly started calling it the threadiverse? They have plans, hold on to your seat.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

    I've been under the impression people started using the term threadiverse to describe the Lemmy/Kbin side of the fediverse because we exist in Reddit style threads and interaction with microblog style fediverse posts is obtuse at best. We're practically in a separate bubble over here, and that was the cause of the new term.

    Edit: The first time I saw the term used was when FediDB made a page for tracking Lemmy+Kbin users

    Edit 2: Archive.org link to the Threadiverse page from June 15th, half a month before the Threads name leaked.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    I hadn't heard it once until threads started up. I didn't join until the great migration, so maybe earlier people used it, but I had only seen fediverse to describe it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I think FediDB coined the term. It definitely existed before Threads had an official name though.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (5 children)

    What is the worse case scenario for me, a person living on kbin? What the heck could they do to ever possibly affect us when we can just pull the plug on them anytime?

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    by user @OtakuAltair@lemm.ee

    If there's one company you should preemptively block, it's Facebook. They have a track record of destroying anything and everything they touch and there is zero reason to think it won't be the same this time. From this post:

    They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:

    • Helping enhance genocides in countries
    • Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
    • Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
    • Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
    • Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
    • Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.

    source

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    This is a lot of text about Meta being evil which nobody disputes. But you didn't answer the question.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    There are quite a few people answering that question in this thread.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    There's one comment speaking about EEE which regurgitated talking points from that one blog post, with author missing the point on why XMPP was unsuccessful. Nothing else but it could be because my instance doesn't federate with some weirdo instances.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    It's like blocking e-mails from Google. People can't take a win.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    To be honest, not a great argument, considering that the hidden magic that Google and a handful of big players do, specifically in relation to spam, is what made emails substantially an oligopoly. Today if you want to run an email server, you need to jump 20 hoops to hope your email will ever reach the mailbox of someone on Gmail. Emails were supposed to be a distributed protocol too...

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    How does defederating prevent that from happening anyway?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    No really relevant for my point, but I assume that preventing them to be effectively part of the fediverse, can reduce the blast radius of their changes, since they will be (more) isolated.

    If they are on the other hand fully part of the fediverse (I.e. nobody defederates them) many people may be incentivised to move to "that instance" because it will realistically have better availability and in the future might have more "features", which is exactly the kind of extensions to the protocol that other won't be able to keep up with.

    I personally used to care more in the past, I don't now that much, but I can definitely see the potential danger.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    The whole argument is that Meta will do whatever they want with their implementation of Activity Pub and lacks any further details. Blast radius of what? How does that affect existing Mastodon instances? Do they lose anything compared to what they have now?

    Threads doesn't need Mastodon users because it has orders of magnitude more already. Mastodon has unique competitive advantage, for example no ads, that could compel Threads users to switch with little friction. It might turn out that Threads will offer things Mastodon won't on principle (follower and notification management for huge accounts) which might actually make whole ecosystem more healthy and diverse.

    Really, it's best to see what's going to happen. I'm optimistic because I think open alternatives are generally better and will win long term.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't know what is going to happen, and as I said, I don't even care that much to be honest.

    Blast radius of what? How does that affect existing Mastodon instances?

    It does if this happens gradually, when instances bleed users to Threads because it has "more features"/works better/etc.

    I’m optimistic because I think open alternatives are generally better and will win long term.

    Good for you, I am not sure what this optimism is grounded on, but I lost it completely. I think the battle is already lost, and open solution can -at best- represent a niche corner of the internet. People are used to things that are addictive and create expectations that are unrealistic for services run with budget at 4 digits top. There is no going back, in my opinion. Either way, this is very much besides the point of my argument, which was that email is exactly an example of how big companies can take over "open" protocols with them being left "open" but effectively having 99% of users on 2/3 providers, and a very high entry barrier which renders the "open" nature of the protocol just a formality.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I'm getting an impression you're not using Mastodon. Vast majority of Mastodon users are there for a very specific reason, to decouple from corporate social networks, and won't switch, period.

    My optimism is grounded on having reasons to believe Meta is implementing Activity Pub so that EU regulators will allow them to operate here depending on whether Meta plays nice.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Agreed. Instances always have the option to defederate with Threads should it prove spammy or ad-filled or socially awful, but I'm cautiously optimistic that Threads will pave the way for a more open social media paradigm in general. Decentralization is a core tenet of Web3, and everyone started focusing on the block chain and Bitcoins and whatnot but there's so much more to decentralization than that.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Why in the world are you cautiously optimistic? What would give you the idea that meta would do anything but what's in their shareholder's interest. My biggest question is, do we know if activitypub is secure enough to keep them out of its software?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I don’t think it’s fair to preemptively assume meta is going to be evil here, where is the evidence?

    If a bear was charging you that you had just watched murder a bunch of people would you just assume it was going to attack you? What evidence would you have for that?

    Personally, I think large tech corporations have a wonderful track record with treating the public commons as a shared resource to nurture and maintain not a coal vein in the ground to ruthlessly extract :)

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    Though this is more federation with a wheel and spoke model than true decentralization where each pier communicates with other piers directly. Each have their place for sure, but they cannot be interchanged because they are not the same thing.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Pretty cool at first glance. Not so cool when they have pulled in enough users and then remove the federation.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    They have orders of magnitude more users than all Mastodon instances combined already.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Part of that is only because any and all Instagram accounts are also considered Threads accounts. I have a feeling active users is probably in a similar ballpark

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    BS. There are 140 mil Threads accounts and over 2 bil Instagram accounts. You can create Threads account with Instagram and for a time they couldn't be decouple but that changed too.

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