Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you’re a server admin, please defederate Meta’s domain “threads.net”
If you don’t run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate “threads.net”.
That’s not how federation works, which makes me worried that users who get to “vote” on this thing (they don’t, it’s the instance owners that do) actually do not understand what would happen.
It’s exactly what would happen, as users on my server would look up instances on meta servers.
is there a writeup somewhere that ideally goes into enough detail to clearly understand how instances/federation work and what would really happen ? I hate Meta but I realize I have no clue what threads coming means and implies, decentralized systems are very unintuitive when you’re used to conventional social media.
The simple thing that requires no deep dive into protocol design is that threads brings with it a metric fuckton of users: multiple orders of magnitude more users than the entirety of the fediverse across all platforms and sites put together. People have used the analogy of a cruise ship full of tourists unloading on a small seaside village of a few hundred people and trashing the place even without there being a need for malevolence, and there’s a certain aptness to that.
Except that Meta is, on top of that, unequivocally malevolent. So to stretch the analogy further, the reason the tourists are unloading in the small village is that Meta Cruise Lines wants to force coastal villages to join their corporate “family” or get obliterated.
right, this is quite evocative and what I initially had in mind, but the question seems to be more subtle? A village is a single centralized unit, here instances can defederate and users can block traffic. Will threads users invade the fediverse village or just not care about it, even if they have access? Could it give an opportunity for ppl to read content that will ever only be threads (political figures. institutions, etc.) without having a meta account and using a meta app? Will the bots that apparently plague threads rn will plague the fediverse? Why don’t they now? If some instances defederate and others not, could I have one account where I talk to the tourists, and another account in a defederated instance where I’m back in my calm village?
I agree with the imagery and moral aspects, but I feel like understanding the practical implications which are not obvious to me is important to gather momentum to kick them out - I felt like people disagree on subjects that they probably shouldn’t if they both had the same understanding of the situation (which includes me).