People are worried that they’ll embrace, extend and extinguish it. That is, join the fediverse, make Threads a better client than any of the existing ones until everyone uses their client, then use that extra reach to harm the fediverse.
I’m personally not that worried, because of who we are. We’re a bunch of geeks with anarchist leanings, and so probably wouldn’t switch to Threads anyway.
Maybe? But a lot of people have exited reddit over the last month. Maybe not the average user but not the most hardcore geek anarchist either-they weren’t on Reddit to begin with. Then there are the obvious reasons that a lot of people have left Twitter an those are the same type of people leaving reddit. So mastodon is probably more at risk than Lemmy but I don’t think for a second that meta would not throw together a Lemmy competitor if they smell any money whatsoever in it.
Either way you run risks simply by interacting with threads, even if you interact accidentally. Their entire business model is to suck every last piece of data out of you that they can so they can sell in every way they can possibly think of to monetize it.
Since lemmyworld has no intention of blocking them I’m finding another instance to move to. Better safe than sorry with a company that has a horrific record on every single issue. And that way if they federate then back out, I won’t be losing anything because I’ll have never seen that content to begin with.
Someone in another thread somewhere said it was stated on mastodon.world that they would only block in if something happens. I don’t remember what topic that was in so unfortunately I don’t have a link for you. At any rate, silence also speaks volumes.
I think the main fear would be that a few really cool communities naturally spark up, even if they’re niche, and could long term create that fracture when you have to choose between keeping with that community (and any corporate backed extensions) or not.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Zoom and others’ chat platforms are made out of defederated XMPP, being the reason XMPP, a federated chat protocol itself, has never become popular in the past 20 years.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is a tactic Western capitalist tech companies use to exploit open source technologies for profits and control over society.
Yeah, I enjoy a ton of hobbies where a lot of the people that know their stuff aren’t particularly computer savvy. If they’re not on my platform because it is too technically complex, I’m probably going to at least visit the more walled off platforms (not usually a fun experience).
Yes. Diversity of thought is great. We can enjoy our nerdy echo chambers, but in the end we get outvoted IRL. We need to both know what’s going on in the larger world, and we need some way to help educate. This theoretically allows the best of all worlds.
Please remember the example of Microsoft and open source office document formats. And in the early days of Internet Explorer with HTML. The risk here is that Threads will embrace the fediverse for a bit. Then they will incorporate features that are only available in Threads that will bleed users away from the open source options. All the while vacuuming up user data for profit while having distain for user privacy. Why would we want to allow them to cast aside the privacy for only one of our users? Are we not going to act like stewards for open source and protection of user privacy?
This us exactly the threat. They’ll start setting standards that other instances will be pressured to follow. Those standards will be ways to control the fediverse and make it a propietary data-gathering and sales/advertising platform just like everything else.
It’s simple really. If something as large as Facebook federates, you will never be able to know whether the users you are engaging with are actual people somewhere, and not just large language models.
It’s happening on reddit right now. The only value to this sort of website is engaging with actual people.
If I wanted to talk to a chatbot, I can already do that. Meta has proven again and again that it will manipulate it’s users with insidious content and moderation, and will knowingly harm users, such as by selling user data to foreign governments or deliberately fomenting depression and anxiety in its users, even kids.
If a large corporation like Meta were to join the Fediverse, there could be a few potential risks, notably:
Increase in Centralization: One of the primary objectives of the Fediverse is to maintain a decentralized network that is controlled by its users, not a single entity. However, the participation of a large corporation could potentially lead to an increased centralization, undermining the very principle of the structure.
Monetization and Profit-Driven Activities: Large corporations are generally aimed at generating profit. They could try to introduce monetization features which can change the way the Fediverse currently operates, moving away from the principle of a free and open internet.
Data Privacy and Security: Large corporations sometimes engage in data mining for targeted advertising or selling information to third-parties. Their participation could raise serious concerns about data privacy and security within the Fediverse.
Influence Over Standards and Protocols: If a large corporation becomes a dominant player in the Fediverse, they might impose their own standards and protocols, or make alterations to the existing ones.
Culture Shift: The Fediverse is largely driven by a community that values internet freedom, privacy, and decentralization. A large corporation could change the culture and nature of interactions within the Fediverse.
Bear in mind that these are potential issues and not guaranteed outcomes. The unique structure of the Fediverse itself can provide some level of resilience against these concerns.
Microsoft did this with Office document formats, effectively killing OpenDocument and dramatically reducing the power of LibreOffice, etc. Threads will incorporate features that are not available in the open source versions of lemmy, driving users to their platform and marginalizing the open source versions. All the while sucking up user data and ignoring user privacy. Are we not stewards for user privacy for ALL users, not just the savvy ones?
This is what people want to avoid. Meta is a bad actor, they intend on making their presence ubiquitous so people end up relying on it for their internet experience.
Y’know how you need a Facebook account to sign up for all sorts of things now? That’s what people want to avoid happening in the fediverse.
They will start setting standards that other instances will be pressured to follow. Those standards will be mechanisms to control the fediverse and make it a data-gathering ad & sales platform.
The will federate, try their best to suck as many users from fediverse as possible into threads, then defederate and become a walled garden again.
As for how they will suck users away:
Make their algorithms prefer posts from threads, so anyone wanting to reach a wider audience needs to move to threads
Add twitter like checkmarks that are only available for users of threads (they will say it is for security since they need to verify the idwntity of checkmarked people)
Add features that are not exposed on activity pub, so that you have to be on threads to use them (twitter did the same by for example not making polls available over API)
Intentionally make their activity pub slow and unreliable to make it look like other instances are broken and threads is fast and reliable.
Unfortunately, realistically speaking there are no users here to suck. In a few days of existence threads already grew ten times bigger than all the fediverse combined.
If lemmy.world doesn’t block very shortly I will move to a different instance.
They won’t. At least not shortly because Threads doesn’t even support ActivityPub, yet, and they want to wait and see according to a post on Mastodon. 👋
I feel the same. Lemmy.world has demonstrated itself as a popular Lemmy instance, like a huge playground, but Facebook instances must be given the boot. I am okay with seeing myself out of here, if it does not happen. Being on lemmy.ml for years, I will have zero issues doing that.
You can also patchReddit is Fun and other 3rd party apps with ReVanced. But it’s not really worth it, Reddit still has too many bots and reposts, ReVanced can’t fix that. Also sooner than later this method won’t work either anymore.
Use APK mirror to download a clean APK and then patch it with revanced. They can’t send you a compiled one because you need to use your reddit account to set up a custom app to get a unique API key that’s just for you
Here is a guide I wrote previously on how I did this step by step for reddit sync. It’ll be similar for the other apps but I haven’t tried any of those.
Go to reddit.com/prefs/aps and go to the bottom where it says “Create Application” (you have to login here to do this)
Name it whatever you want, select “installed app” and under redirect uri, type redditsync/auth then click “create app”
After you create the app, you should see it under the title “Developed Applications”. Under the name you gave it you should see a random string of numbers, letters, and symbols. This is your client ID. You will use this in the next step.
Using a file manager on your phone, navigate to /sdcard/ and create a txt file titled “reddit_client_id_revanced.txt”
Open the text file you just created and paste in your Client ID from step 7. Make sure it is on the top line of the text file with no spaces or indents before or after the ID.
Open Revanced Manager on your phone. Select Patcher on the bottom, click “select application”, click the “storage” button on the bottom right. Navigate to the location where you downloaded the clean redditsync apk in step 2.
When you select the apk file in step 10, you should see that it has selected 2 patches (change Oauth client ID and Disable ads). Click "Patch’ in the bottom right.
Allow the patching to occur and read everything on the screen to check for errors. If the Oauth failed to patch, revisit step 8.
Click install. Google play will likely warn you, expand the option and click “install anyway”, if it asks to scan the app, decline scanning.
Launch the application, run through the setup and re-log into your account if you want.
It’s not about Zuckerberg, it’s about the userbase. With something that grew to 30 million users literally overnight, it’s impossible to determine what it will be like, and how it will mesh with the existing fediverse content/users.
With something this scale, it only makes sense to secure and observe - pre-emptively block, watch the content, maybe even poll the users on what should be done. There is nothing to be lost this way, it’s only a cautious approach towards a potential later link.
What could be lost is the Threads community overwhelms the lemmy community before there is a chance to react (it is 1000x bigger, after all). It makes sense to be cautious, here.
This isn’t inconveniencing anyone, any user can make an account on Threads as well and use both right now.
Fun thoughts and all but that isn’t the reason why they’re blocking it. It’s because Facebook is bad. Corporation, big, embrace, expand, extinguish, evil. Plenty of explanations around about why these blocks happened. However you’re also right. If it were very small like a 15k people instance and it didn’t carry corporations inside maybe they’d consider not blocking.
I don’t think threads actually has 30 million users. They have some paid shills, probably a lot of their own bots, some people who legit joined to see what it was about, and a bunch of Instagram users who had accounts created automatically. I’m not positive about the last point but if you can’t delete threads without deleting Instagram then I’m sure they’re going to leverage their Instagram userbase as much as possible here.
I’m not concerned how many of these are real users - all the shills, the bots, are even worse than real users as they will just be spewing their propaganda around as much as possible.
Adding ONE million users overnight to the fediverse would be disruptive enough, 10x the biggest day from the influx from reddit. We’re looking at orders of magnitude more than that.
If I wanted to see facebook shit I would use facebook, I stopped using whatsapp when it was bought by facebook, I don’t want to see their content overwhelming the fediverse, that’s why I’m here instead of there.
I don’t agree with this notion of “facebook content” vs “fediverse” content or anything like that. Content is just content, it’s links, it’s media, whatever. It’s not “facebook shit” any more than reddit shit or lemmy shit. Content is a by-product of the users, so who/what the userbase is is extremely important - and that is why how it is marketed, who it appeals to and so forth, and the relative scale. thousands of lemmy users being drowned out by millions of Threads users, who are a different demographic, have different goals for the platform, and so forth, is the real issue.
You acknowledge that you have moved on from platforms when facebook/meta have got involved, and you’re welcome to take your decisions on this, but it runs into problems in a federated environment where the goal is to increase interoperability by default.
Don’t get me wrong, I think our goals are the same, to have an environment where people can talk and share links that is relatively exclusive / for like-minded people. I just don’t think the angle of facebook/not facebook is the right one (tbh I would go further - I would not integrate, but not because of the provenance/company, but because of the users’ expectations coming over from Threads)
Content is just content, it’s links, it’s media, whatever
Content is not all the same, there’s quality content and there’s shitposting.
“facebook content” is mostly - to me - shitposting, astroturfing, botting, propaganda, etc. as reddit has become lately, while lemmy content is mostly quality discussions.
I don’t want shitposting burying quality content here, that’s what will happen if we don’t do anything about it.
Not to mention corporate control, look what happened to reddit, and look at how many scandals there are about faceboook (now meta) as a company, why do you think they want to join the fediverse, they don’t give a crap about quality, their only interest is in monetizing stuff, embrace - extend - extinguish, I don’t want ANY of that happening to lemmy.
I think you didn’t understand my comment. " thousands of lemmy users being drowned out by millions of Threads users, who are a different demographic, have different goals for the platform" specifically.
Ideologically, de-federating an instance just because you don’t like the guy running it would be a bad thing, but Facebook/Meta has been just so toxic to the internet as a whole it’s hard to really find fault with it.
Ideologically, I find more fault in inviting meta to the playground than locking them out. They are the very definition of an evil corporation and no good can come of it.
Pragmatically, twitter style system requires a large networked userbase to be useful for most of the population, otherwise people are tooting into the void in mastodon. So even if I have to work with some soulless corporations to get there I think it’s a net positive. For lemmy i don’t think threads matters much.
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