I see many people purporting that users blocking Threads on an individual basis as a solution, but it’s not… Blocking Threads will not prevent Threads users’ comments in federated instances from showing up.
Even if you block Threads, you will still see hateful, harassing, and extremist content and misinformation.
Furthermore, even if it did block Threads engagement entirely on an individual blocking basis, it is still a failure on the instance admins to adequately protect their users and cultivate a healthy community.
.world admins defederated with exploding heads due to hate, harassment, and extremism/misinformation. Why would they then federate with Threads which harbors the same toxic users?
It’s a move to bring more users into the Fediverse, but it comes with costs and risks that do not justify the short-sighted gain of more users and inching towards becoming mainstream.
Threads has been subject to mass amounts of radicalizing, extremist content, and there have also been instances of users having personal information doxxed on Threads due to Meta’s information-harvesting practices. [1]
Threads was marketed to be open to ‘free speech’ (read: hate speech and misinformation) and encouraged the Far-Right movement to join, who have spread extremism, hate, and harassment on Threads already. [2] Threads has been a hotbed of Israel-Palestine misinformation/propaganda. [3]
They fired fact-checkers just prior to Threads’ launch [1], however they claim they will have 3rd party fact-checkers next year. [4]
Meta/FB/Instagram has a rampant history of illegal and unethical practices, including running experiments on their users which affected their moods and induced depression in many uninformed, non-consenting subjects. [5] Such unethical experiments could affect federated users as well.
(Edit: As @massive_bereavement reminded me, Meta also assisted in genocide! [6])
Meta/FB/Instagram also have a strong history of facilitating the spread of misinformation and extremism, which contributed to the January 6th insurrection attempt. [7]
If exploding heads was defederated with because of this sort of toxic extremism, why would they want to federate with a platform plagued by that same content? One known for shortcomings moderating it? And one which comes from a company with a long history of unethical and illegal practices regarding users?
Due to these issues and Meta’s rampant history of unethical and illegal business practices, there should be no federation with Threads for the well-being of the users in this instance.
I have donated to the .world instance since my first week here, but should they continue with federating with Threads, I will be cancelling my donations and finding an instance that won’t undermine the safety and well-being of their users for a boost of (largely toxic) new users and an inch towards being mainstream.
The gains are immediate but minimal, and come at great costs which do not warrant federating with Threads (IMO).
Your honor, I would also like to present their role in Myanmar’s genocide
Ah yes, how could I have forgotten!?
They are seriously comic-book villain level evil, and I find it mind-boggling that federation with Threads is even a consideration, let alone the plan…
“The day I visited your village was the most important day in your life. For me it was Tuesday.” Kind of vibe.
WHICH it reminds me of this fabulous piece of writing:
https://mashable.com/article/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-parody-spoof
I wanted to add that repetition is key in the process with which people are radicalized. It typically involves an individual who is in a vulnerable state (job loss, interpersonal hardship, injury) and the individual is exposed to repeated misinformation/extremism, and this is then reinforced by the radical in-group. [1]
Radicalism spreads through a social contagion effect, and social media (including lemmy and reddit) can act as a catalyst which facilitates the spread of extremism. [1]
This information is covered in this article I published on my blog explaining how people become radicalized. (I have ads turned off and do not benefit in any way from my blog. It’s purpose is to share information.)
I wrote that article partly selfishly to wrap my head around family I have lost to Far-Right radicalism. It is essentially a literature review, and it’s well-cited and thoroughly explains the process of radicalization. I’ll also add that this is in my field of study/career, and I’m working on my Master’s in Clinical Counseling.
It is very relevant here, as the federation with Threads will allow for the extremism permeating Threads to seep into our instance, even if the individual user blocks them. (Remember, blocking Threads won’t stop Threads users’ comments from being displayed here.)
This opens the doorway for vulnerable individuals in our instance to have their rationality chipped away until they lose their self-identity and experience identity fusion with a radical group. [2]
If instances federate with Threads, they are deciding to put their users at risk, and hold culpability in the loss of self-identities, fractured families, extremism, and real-world consequences that could subsequently result from federation with Threads.
Yes frustrating that no one adds a link to the damn page
Cheers mate
Ugh, we’re federated with threads? There goes the neighborhood
Voice your opposition before the decision is implemented. I know I’m jumping ship if Threads ends up being federated with.
Absolutely same
What the actual fuck?
Like mastondon.world admin said, you can always block the threads.net at user level.
The instance itself will wait and see.
We won’t pre-emptively defederate from Threads. Users can themselves decide to block threads. (If we were to defederate, users can’t anymore decide to un-block themselves.)
We will keep a close eye on all developments with Threads joining the Fediverse, and when we see trouble, we might reconsider this statement.
Edit: mastodon.world not mastodon.social
“Wait and see” for what though? Meta is already a known bad actor in social media. Why give them the benefit of the doubt?
If anyone is interested in the very long list of unethical and illegal practices of Meta, here’s some of their rampant inexcusable and repeated shitty practices!
Wait a see what they actually do. Mad idea, I know.
Man, I can’t believe the hot stove burned me, again!
Maybe next time will be different…
Zuckerberg: I don’t know why. Zuckerberg: They “trust me” Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
I forgot about that quote haha. That’s such a great retort to this “wait and see” approach.
Pay attention @Ruud, this is what Mark Zuckerberg thinks of you.
Zuckerberg requesting and being given the your intimate personal information, isn’t really the same as s Zuckerberg plan to make information on a Meta social network readable from another social network, but sure. I’m not saying Meta is trustworthy, I’m saying let’s see what they do. Having a way for people to interact with people on Threads, without having to join Threads could be quite useful.
There’s no reason to wait.
Look right now, and see that there’s enough justification to say no to federating with Threads.
It’s a bit of polemic that suggests that the main reason for blocking Threads is that is full off appalling hateful content. I haven’t used Threads since in initially signing up, so I had a quick look and it wasn’t particularly toxic, as far as I can see. If it is - and that content comes across, that is of course good reason for instances to block it - and I’m sure they will. Meanwhile I was amused to see on Threads the same debate been handled from the opposite direction:
There’s plenty of justification not to federate beyond the extremism, from the unethical experiments they conduct on their users to their aiding in genocide.
Lol dumb nerds are the worst. In our company they hired bunch of devs who built the app before the deadline thinking they will get promoted and now most of them are redundant and one works in support.🤣🤣
This does not stop user comments from Threads. They will still be visible throughout .world/federated instances, where they can spread more misinformation and radicalism.
Lol so funny- will wait and see…🤣🤣🤣
Wait and see is what I wrote. I added the text from the original toot.
What an infuriating UI design, red for federated and green for blocked?
Either way, thanks for a useful link since my instance admin blocked Threads for whatever reason and I needed to find a new one. Cheers!
It’s because the dev behind the website pushes his anti-threads agenda onto you.
Red means bad.
I mean, what do you expect from Fedipact? The dev doesn’t push anything onto you, you willingly visit a list that got created for the very purpose of going against Threads. There is no hidden agenda.
The standard is green for yes, red for no.
The dev chose to flip this, consciously.
For “willingly visiting the site”, you can apply that to anything on the internet, don’t see a point there.
“Yes” in this case is agreeing with the cause of this list.
Yeah that’s the whole point.
Yes is something non standard, it’s a pushed opinion making something seem bad even though everyone should make their own opinion.
Maybe they Chinese? In Chinese stock markets red is up green down.
No. Federated = bad, thus it is red.
Embrace < you are here
Extend
Extinguish
Technically, aren’t we at Extend?
No. Extend is the part where they add their own proprietary features to the protocol that create interoperability problems with the rest of the services using the protocol.
Can someone ELI5 here. So Lemmy.world is a Reddit like site, Threads is a Twitter like site. What does it mean when they’re federated?
Content and data is shared between instances.
But what does that mean? How would I see content from one on the other?
You are commenting on a LemmyNet post from the shit just works instance. I am replying from a LemmyNet account on lemmy.world. It could also happen that someone from a Mastodon instance could reply to this comment. Everyone can have their account on a specific instance (even self-hosting their own instance) and still be able to see content from other websites. There is no singular website that hosts all data and there is no singular authority (ok maybe you could argue the developers of the software, but it’s also open source and other options do exist so it’s not a true single point of authority) for the entire network.
Have you never talked to someone on #Mastodon yet? They all use ActivityPub as a protocol.
I’m on Mastodon also. But how do they connect?
You can reply to Lemmy posts or comments on Mastodon and they appear as comments on here. If someone replies to that comment, you’ll see the reply on Mastodon.
Both systems use ActivityPub which is how they can talk to each other.
I told you already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
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That’s means that I can see your content from lemmy.zip
Your IP, comments, username , liked post, disliked post and other identifiers will be shared with facebook.
Defederating doesn’t stop that, it just stops that their IP gets shared with us.
With FB and every other instance. Are you vetting who has controlling stake in every instance you federate with?
You do realise that your account on here is public, right? Anyone can collect data like comments, and it’s likely already being used to train AI models just like Reddit data was.
The only way to avoid data being sent to other servers is by having a private account that can’t be viewed while logged out, and never interacting with content from other servers. I don’t think it’s even possible to have a private Lemmy account.
So by your logic, you just want to hand out everything to Facebook on a golden platter. Let them scrape the data if they want but handing out willingly is like smoking cigarette only to get cancer.
The data is already handed out willingly. Anyone can write code that federates with a Lemmy instance using the ActivityPub protocol, subscribe, and receive a feed of all posts and comments, or federates with a Mastodon instance and receives a feed of all posts. They could even hide that data fetching behind a legit Lemmy installation. The entire purpose of ActivityPub is that it’s an open protocol that anyone can use.
The instance you’re on federates with around 5850 servers: https://lemmy.world/instances. Do you really think the admins have verified every one of them to ensure they’re legit?
I understand but the point that I am trying to make is Facebook is a data harvesting company and already got tools and algorithms in place. They can actually do some real damage when compared to a small company or a college student trying to scrape data for a project. Facebook isn’t know for helping people and making a better change so why risk it?
Arguably all big tech companies do some sort of data harvesting though. Google is primarily an advertising and data collection company, and their data collection is more widespread than others - have you seen how many sites have Google Analytics on it, how many people use Android, and how many people use Gmail, Google Drive, etc? Apple allow data collection as long as it’s them doing it (hence trying to block third-parties from doing it - giving them an advantage).
If you’re worried about data harvesting, the real companies you need to worry about are companies like Acxiom/Liveramp, Experian, Datalogix, Neustar, etc. These are the companies that create profiles on you based on data they gather from a very large number of different sources (credit card data, supermarket reward programs, frequent flyer programs, mailers / TV ads you respond to, internet ads you click, things you buy online, etc) and sell them to advertisers. The big tech companies don’t do anything like that, and generally keep their data to themselves (the data is what makes companies like Google valuable, so they’re not going to just give it to other companies!)
when compared to a small company or a college student trying to scrape data for a project.
How can you be sure that only small companies or students are scraping Lemmy/Mastodon data today? One of those 5800 servers that federate with your Lemmy instance could be funneling data to a data analysis firm.
So you want to federate with facebook just because you think may be other small companies are doing it. Is that correct ?
In the short run it probably doesn’t matter. However Threads is do big that it could theoretically crush us
So the instances which can’t access Facebook content but can still be seen by Facebook… that will show 'em
The key is to not let Threads content overtake all other content. Threads is big so it could overwhelm everyone on the fediverse
Yeah the people pushing this agenda don’t seem to grasp that whatever you post goes to threads. They still get your data no matter what. And so does Google and every other web scraping technology.
What’s more concerning is the hate, extremism, and misinformation that will be coming from Threads.
That is the actual problem and where the level of concern and majority disinterest in Threads federation stems from.
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I don’t think it has anything to do with data (this is the public internet). Its about Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
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Blocking Threads on the instance user level does not block Threads users from commenting and spreading radicalism/misinformation throughout federated instances. It’s a half-measure. To actually block Threads, it requires the instance to defederate.
I’m ethically opposed to federation because it is with a platform plagued by hate, radicalism, and misinformation. [1] Including being a hotbed for Israel-Palestine misinformation. [2]
I think it’s hypocritical to defederate from exploding heads and to then federate with Threads which harbors the same harmful content and toxic userbase.
If lemmy.world goes through with federating with Threads, I’m out of here and my donations to the instance are too.
I agree with you in being ethically opposed to Threads but I can’t fault any instance that wants to wait for Threads to violate their policies before defederating.
I know some instances have chosen to preemptively defederate and that’s their perogative, I just don’t think all of the vitriol I’ve seen towards instances that haven’t is fair at this point.
Edit: I wanted to add that the only federate/defederate with Threads decision I would take issue with is any instance where the admin refuses to listen to the majority of its members or allows Threads to violate policy with impunity.
I think your position is very reasonable. I want to point out that I don’t hold any malice towards the instance admins. I have thought .world admins have been great. But I fundamentally disagree with the decision to federate Threads and want to voice reasonable dissent.
I am personally invested in this platform and community, and I am impassioned in stating my case. I don’t want my assertive arguments to be taken as anger or malice.
