Lemmy.ca's Main Community

Great to have an official answer. Thank you!

I decided to sign on here because of this stance. Also I missed the company of my fellow Canucks ;)

Thank you!!

Good-faith question for you admins to laymen like myself; what do you believe you are protecting yourselves from by blocking Threads? Isn't the nature of the Fediverse resistant, if not immune, to corotate shenanigans? Isn't the only thing you're accomplishing by defederating Theads is that you're just making yourselves invisible to a large userbase who are too lazy to care about their own personal data?

We're all still protected, no?

How is defederating going to help here? I'm genuinely asking. Doesn't that just stop their content from showing on our feeds? It shouldn't affect the amount of user data they can collect which isn't much anyways because we're not using their proprietary software.

My understanding is that people on exploding heads for example can still read these comments too. They just can't reply. Or they can but we don't see their replies. Only the people that federate with them do.

Am I getting something wrong here?

You're absolutely right!

Meta is a threat to the privacy of fediverse users, if there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta.

Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/

I'm new to federation as a concept, but isn't the only thing you accomplish from defederating Threads is that this community will miss the opportunity to grow its userbase? Isn't the whole point of the fediverse that anyone can be anywhere and access anything from anywhere else?

If so, the only people who come out behind are the people signing up on Threads specifically, who are granting every piece of personal data to Meta. But people signed up on other instances are protected.

As far as I understand, the existing fediverse is not at risk of anything, correct?

Federation is independent from content type so technically yeah, but seeing as you wouldn't really want to see microblog type content in a link aggregator style display... It doesn't really matter. Not to mention that afaik threads ain't even federated yet...

Mastodon, kbin, lemmy and all the other fediverse apps all use the same api, activitypub. This means we can all interact with each other even with very different ui and content goals. Mastodon doesn't interact with lemmy much right now because the uis don't really mesh very well, but it's possible. If you see a post that has @<community name> in it that's a good sign it probably came from mastodon or similar.

Any service which makes use of ActivityPub should be able to federate with other services using the same. Hence why you can see posts from people using kbin. You can usually tell when a mastodon user comments because their reply will start with an @replyingto @originalposter

Then Meta would help everyone cope with the extra workload ... then help some more with a few changes .... then offer some new features ... then help with increased usage ... then offer more features ... then push out the smaller instances and take over everything ... then wall off ActivityPub ... then start charging people and advertisers .. then make billions ... then watch users rebel and start a new system and repeat it all again in 10 or 20 years.