Meta

Forgive my newbness, but is it up to instance owners to defederate? Or individual users? I don’t really know how it works.

A few points to make on this topic:

1. There is presently nobody to defederate from: They aren't in the fediverse yet, and while we can guess they'll use threads.net as their domain, that's all it would be - a guess. There is no point preemptively defederating from that domain when we don't even know it's what they'll use in federation.
2. Defederating is trivial from the instance level. Just type their domain to the "blocked instances" setting and it's done for everyone. This move can be made at any time in under a minute.
3. A change to the behaviour of aussie.zone this large will likely be passed by the users in some way. It's not a thing to undertake lightly.
4. The new Lemmy allows users to block instances for them personally. If you don't want to personally interract with Threads, just add them to your block list and it's done. You won't see anything from that instance. It'll also mean you won't see replies to their comments made from here. ^*^

^*^ You can't actually defederate from them yet, as the "block instance" UI searches for federated domains and won't permit you to add threads.net as that domain is not federated. You'll need to do this if/when they actually federate with the rest of us.

Personally I think this is ridiculous.

First, there's the simple fact that Lemmy's interaction with Threads will likely be the same relatively rare/limited interaction we currently have with Mastodon. People might show up to comment from time to time, and we'll be able to @mention their users. But that's about it. It's not a serious issue for Lemmy instances to be concerned about.

But second, I think pre-emptive defederation here, regardless of whether we're talking about Lemmy or Mastodon instances, is ridiculous. If they start doing bad things, it is trivial to defederate at that time. If they don't, we're much better off letting them participate and benefit from the increased number and variety of users with whom we can interact thanks to their participation in the fediverse.

Don't fall for FUD when there's an opportunity knocking.

I think it's really worth watching this Flipboard interview/podcast with Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon.

https://flipboard.video/w/cTBu4HusskGTuPBahqm6WY

He sees it as a good thing, and I'm inclined to trust his judgement - it lets us share our ideals and culture with a broader audience, it lets us engage with a larger amount of content (if we want to), and we still have the power to block it at any point if we decide it's a bad thing. Pre-emptive defederation takes the power out of users hands, only grants more power to large silicon valley corporations, and is self-defeating if the goal is to try to move to a federated web.

Also, their federation is likely to have a near non-existent impact on aussie.zone, given we're a link-aggregation platform and not a microblog like Mastodon or Kbin.

I'm not sure that most Lemmy users have much to fear from Threads because it's a microblogging thing which Lemmy isn't. I

I'm on Kbin where there's slightly more of a concern in theory because Kbin has microblogging capabilities baked in but I don't think it's used very much (I have a separate Mastodon account anyway and that's where the real discussions about all this are happening understandably).

In practice I don't know, I have a strong feeling Meta aren't really interested in this corner of the fediverse right now, they want to be a Twitter-killer after all not a Reddit competitor. Which is why if you're interested in the subject most of the actual debate is going on Mastodon or equivalents.

None of this is going against your main point necessarily, Meta are obviously very shady. But also innocent until proven guilty, you know? Most instances have a pretty solid code of law.

Mods are going to be in for a bumpy ride though...

I'm deeply conflicted about this, I want federation with big services, I think that is part of the raison d'etre of #activitypub.

But I know the risks, I'm old enough to remember #Microsoft embracing and extinguishing the browser, #Goggle defederating from #XMPP and #Facebook predatory tactics.

Also, I'm starting to think that federation with the big players is unstoppable. The protocol is open and there is no way to get every instance operator on board with the #fedipact . If people want to see the big players' content they'll move to an instance that federates with them. And defederating from those that connect to threads sounds like a Zealot's suicide pact.

Ideally we'd need some kind of legal protection, that makes big services accoutable for what they do with open protocols, but the best we can hope is that the threat of such legislation being enacted will scare the bigs ones into playing fair.

In the mean while there are no technical measures that I can think of and the social measures are unlikely to work. The only thing we can do is to enter into this with open eyes, aware of our history and hope for the best.

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