I think it should. Has it defederated and does it plan to?
doing some housekeeping this afternoon and yes we have already decided to do this. (if it hasn’t been done yet it will shortly, but someone besides me is going to be doing it)
Obviously, they have the same problem that other instances that have been defedded suffer from, they don’t screen their users and they can’t handle moderation. They won’t invest in the necessary amount personnel to moderate and they won’t moderate at a level that keeps out annoying trolls, scammers, and other nonsense.
It’s my understanding that we already decided not to federate with them?
That being said, I’m ethically opposed to supporting the corporate invasion of both FOSS and anti-corporate spaces.
With Meta, specifically, their MO with literally every tech space they’ve ever entered has been to EEE, and I think the “wait and see” approach to give them the benefit of the doubt that they won’t do the same thing here is naivete at best and willful ignorance at worst.
I’m not normally a huge fan of defederation but in this case I very much support it. Fuck Meta and its services. They are one of the most actively malicious companies towards the health of the internet and its users that exists today. This was seen immediately with Threads’ privacy policy the moment it was made available.
Why even make treads with activity pub tho? What purpose does it serve?
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Only reason I can think of is to get in on the ground floor of the fediverse and eat its lunch.
I imagine they see a world where ActivityPub is meant for federation between services from the likes of Twitter, Meta, Google, and other big players with maybe a large open source project that gets defanged.
Nah, they don’t want to interoperate with other companies. They just want to take over the federated space and strangle it.
I don’t think they’re necessarily against federation with others, now that I think about it more. We’re just content for them, to promote the endless scroll for their own users to get trapped in.
Sure, that’s the embrace part of embrace, extend, and extinguish. Get their users to use their platform with all of the pre-existing networks and content, so that it’s a viable alternative to Twitter, and they bring such a big community that the major established players want to interact with it.
Step two, declare that they’ve got some great ideas on how the space can be improved, but activitypub doesn’t support them, and they don’t want to wait around for the standard to update; we need to bring these improvements to our users now! So they unofficially “extend” the standard, so everyone on Threads is getting the new gee-whiz feature, but they can still talk to everyone else. Meanwhile, everyone else’s experience is a little bit worse. And while we’re at it, maybe we add something that feels bad for both sides when a non-Threads user interacts with a Threads user. So gosh, I mean, why not go ahead and migrate your account over to Threads? You don’t lose anything; you still get to interact with your existing networks, nothing bad happens, just that now you also get the cool features.
Step three (and this one happens much later), the overwhelming majority of users are using Threads, because it does all the cool stuff that Mastodon can’t do. So now we’ve got another great idea, but unfortunately, this one just isn’t compatible with activitypub. So, we’re gonna give you guys some heads up in advance, if you want to stay connected, you gotta switch over to Threads, and if you don’t it’s just gonna be a wasteland because all of those users aren’t visible to you anymore, and your grandma is gonna be sad that she can’t talk to you because you won’t take the simple step of signing up for a free account.
This isn’t idle speculation. Google did this exact thing with XMPP a decade ago.
Beehaw signed the fedipact. That makes defederation official.
Even if it weren’t for the privacy concerns, and Facebook’s history, Threads has whitelisted LibsOfTiktok, so any reports against them are auto-rejected in a couple of minutes, which should mean instant defederation even for instances that were on the fence.
I am so opposed to being on an instance that is federated with Meta that I’d probably delete my account if that happened. Thankfully I understand that Beehaw has already made the decision not to federate with them.
No, it should not. IMO, defederation is toxic for the fediverse. One of the major advantages of the fediverse is that you don’t have a walled garden. Don’t try to make one.
Defederation is not toxic, it’s an essential tool. The ability to choose what kind of contents and account you can see is one of the best part of decentralised social networks.
The ability to choose what kind of contents and account you can see is one of the best part of decentralised social networks.
Sure, but that’s why the user can choose to ignore instances/communities…?
There are limits to defederation at a user level. Hard defederation can only be done at a server level.
And server owners have the responsibility to keep their place safe from bad actors
How do they do that? By defederating servers that contain and promote that type of people and content.
A place like Beehaw that calls itself a safe space for marginalised groups cannot federate with anything owned by Meta, which openly allows racist, ableist and anti queer rhetoric on their platforms.
They already block a long list of alt-right servers, why would threads (that has already whitelisted alt-right propaganda groups like libsoftiktok) be any different?
When I choose this server I did because I knew they would defederate from any server promoting alt-right/“free speech” rhetoric
