Threads is automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed

https://merv.news/post/1197552

Threads is automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed - Merveilles

For anyone wondering if Threads and Facebook at large will be a fine neighbor in the space and compatible with other apps/services in the fediverse: they’re already automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed https://mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807 [https://mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807]

Im SOOOO surprised. /s
mEtA wOnT dEsTrOy ThE fEdIvErSe. wE sHoUlD lEt tHrEaDs In
Yeah because that’s an opinion people have

Oh no, it was everywhere, and I got into some decent arguments with those lovely people who ask you to show them how it’s going to have any effect on the fediverse at all, complete with citations.

WeLl hOw Do YoU KnOw?

All anyone has to do is log in to their gmail or fucken m365 email and you’ll see the future of corporate federation. Its “the same thing”.
Buddy, search for Threads related posts from a few months back. This was seriously in question.
It still is. I think more folks percentage-wise are OK now than were then. Had the argument just yesterday. I’m not seeing nearly enough pitchforks, and it worries me.
You can search for threads and literally see these comments yourself buddy
The largest lemmy instance (lemmy,world) is federated with them. I assume their mastodon instance also is.
Had that argument yesterday. It IS an opinion people have.

Let’s just give them a chance guys. They haven’t done anything bad yet. It will help the fediverse grow. We need their content

wE cAn AlwAyS dEfeDeraTe lAtEr. It dEfinIteLy WoN’T bE tOo LaTe tHeN

I have to post this again sorry

I remember you from the Reddit post!
Highly unlikely. I dont post on reddit
Hahaha the post ABOUT Reddit. Posting the same image. Sorry, when I reread my comment, it comes off absolutely NOT how I intended!
I thought @dansup already committed to blocking federation with Meta. Why does he care if they're shutting him out, too?

People make more complex decisions when they have multiple roles:

  • As admin of pixelfed.social, dansup may have decided it is best for that community not to federate with Threads, at least at first
  • As the lead developer of the Pixelfed software, he probably doesn’t like anyone censoring discussion of his software
  • As an individual with an interest in social media, he has a Threads account and is participating in conversations there; he would probably like to be able to talk about the projects he’s working on
Repeat after me: I will not federate with any Meta products.
I will not federate with any meta products.
I will not federate with any meta products.
I will not federate with any meta products.
I will not federate with any meta products
I will not federate with any meta products
I will not federate with any meta products
I will not federate with any meta products
I will not federate with any meta products
Serious question: how do we - the end users - stop federating with Meta?
Move to an instance that won’t.
Burying your head in the sand doesn’t change the fact that whatever LW does will affect all of Lemmy. They’re too big.
This is a strange response for me because de-federating is an active step on behalf of its admin, usually after a vote amongst its users, at creating a virtual boundary between the two entities. How is that burying your head in the sand? And yeah, lemmy.world is big, but aside from the obvious loss of content/users, what other effect will that have on the mass of de-federated instances?

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that since LW will federate with them, any content they host, will end up on meta.

For example, this discussion we’re having right now is on [email protected]. So it doesn’t matter whether our own instances have defederated meta - our posts and comments here will bring them value. Directly, in the form of content. And indirectly, in the form of processable data for machine learning, shadow profiles, etc.

but my understanding is that since LW will federate with them, any content they host, will end up on meta

Your understanding is wrong. Instances don’t forward stuff from other instances to other instances. Instances only send their own content directly to the instances they federate with.

So on a different instance that’s not federated with Meta I can see LW content but not Metas?
That sounds like a problem for instances federated with Meta. Empathy is cool but they are not our problem.

whatever LW does will affect all of Lemmy

Uuuh no it won’t? The fact that they federate with Threads doesn’t mean that my instance does. How does it affect me?

You posted this to a LW community, so your content and data will end up in Meta’s hands as well.
No, that’s not how federation works. My instance sends my content directly to everything my instance federates with. No instance takes content from other instances and sends it further - that is not a thing. I sent my content to lemmy.world and it is free to be there. Lemmy.world will not forward that to Threads.

Migrate away from instances that embrace Meta to those that do not. Choose an instance that aligns with you.

Or in the extreme case, if you’re the first who can’t find such an instance and you’re technically inclined, there’s your room for a new instance. It’s how the fediverse works and partly why Meta is so intent on destroying it.

How does one find a list of instances that aren’t federated?

Unfortunately there is no explicit list, but I believe there are tools that will draw a graph of the fediverse and allow you to check that a particular instance does not. I’m not sure what the name is off the top of my head.

Naturally, if you see anything posted direct from Threads in your feed, that means your instance that you’re connected to is passing that data.

Replied in another comment, but here is is again. fedipact.veganism.social
#Fedipact - The instances blocking Zuckerberg's Threads.net

An interactive list to see which ActivityPub (Matodon, Lemmy, FireFish, etc) instances are federating with Threads.net

Appreciate the link! Glad to see that both my mastodon and lemmy instances have already blocked their content.
What’s the difference between blocked and fedipact?
I think fedipact actually sign the pack to block and the others just blocked.

The tooltip for fedipact says: “Agreed to block all communications (their blocklist is private)”

To me that says, they’ve agreed but it’s not confirmed that they’ve gone through with it because the blocklist is private. Blocked on the other hand says “All communications are blocked”

Thanks! I was on mobile and couldn’t see the tooltip
Thanks for this. Looking to make an account on a better server now

I don’t know, but you can check individual instances by going to the /instances subdomain and searching for threads.

shjw and blahaj are defederated, world isn’t.
This can always change, but I have confidence in my admins.

Edit: Thanks to [email protected] for this link

#Fedipact - The instances blocking Zuckerberg's Threads.net

An interactive list to see which ActivityPub (Matodon, Lemmy, FireFish, etc) instances are federating with Threads.net

Not sure anyone posted this in direct reply to you - fedipact.veganism.social

You can search/filter for your instance there. As an example, if you search lemmy.world you’ll see they currently do federate with meta.

#Fedipact - The instances blocking Zuckerberg's Threads.net

An interactive list to see which ActivityPub (Matodon, Lemmy, FireFish, etc) instances are federating with Threads.net

I’m kind of stupid and more here just because it tends to be better discussion than Reddit: what does “federate with” mean in this context??

Thanks!

@Minotaur @henfredemars @technology You are using an account on lemm.ee to reply to someone commenting from an account on infosec.pub in a community hosted on lemmy.world.

Those are all running Lemmy software, but I am replying from an account on social.goodanser.com, which is running Mastodon software.

That's federation. We're all using different service providers, sometimes even different software, but we can talk to each other because they speak the same protocol, called ActivityPub. Threads.net has announced plans to support ActivityPub and conducted some limited trials, which they're in the process of expanding. They claim they intend to support it fully, but only for users who opt in to it.

Servers can block, or "defederate from" other servers, and many have chosen to preemptively defederate from Threads.

Very interesting. Appreciate the response. Didn’t know big companies like meta had any interest in the whole “federation” gig, seeing that it seems a little “opposed” to the kind of big revenue that supports tech companies like that

But it actually isn’t, because the largest driver of growth for platforms like facebook & instagram is the already present userbase.

That userbase will always be there if the programs are all federated together, so creating a new platform is now just making a better site versus that and bringing in the userbase.

And now I’m commenting from a lemmy.world account because Lemmy from Mastodon has some rough edges like the need to tag the community in my comment above to ensure it actually reaches the lemmy.world server.

Tumblr and Flickr are also talking about ActivityPub support, but it’s not clear if or when that will actually happen. It would make more sense to me for those services since they’re fairly small and it’s a way to substantially increase the possible audience. It’s not clear what Meta’s motivations are here, though a motivation some have proposed is that they’re trying to get in front of potential regulation. The EU Digital Markets Act, for example requires some services to interoperate with competitors, and having one of its new products join an established standard protocol is a way to say “you don’t need to regulate us, we already do the thing”.

I don’t think their blocking of comments mentioning Pixelfed is intentional. Pixelfed is not popular enough for Meta to care about as a competitor, and blocking mentions of competitors has never been among their tactics.

Appreciate this response, it seems to make a lot of sense to me.

I think people on sites like Lemmy and similar can kind of uhh… overestimate how much anyone outside of a very niche crowd care about the whole “federalization” movement, and yeah it seems unlikely to me that Threads is going out of its way to shadowban a niche competitor like Pixelfed

I’m about 99% sure Threads uses automated spam/abuse filtering based on uncommon words present in posts that have recently been flagged as abusive. Somebody, perhaps several somebodies probably posted “follow my porn account on Pixelfed” or similar that Threads doesn’t like. I’d use something like that if I was making a huge social media thing because you can’t not at that scale.

That’s exactly why Threads is incompatible with the Fediverse. Any huge server that is impossible to moderate for admins is detrimental to the network and failure to properly moderate is the number one reason we should be looking at to defederate from instances.

Automatic “spam” protection is the exact thing which co-opted e-mail. Big corps with the largest e-mail user base use algorithms that automatically assume the worst about any small e-mail server. If you spin up a small server you are assumed to be spam unless unless unless, which ended up with e-mail being centralized in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple, despite being theoretically decentralized too.

Is that what we want for the Fediverse? 4 or 5 huge instances automatically defederating from all small instances unless they fit some criteria defined by the big corps, which they can change anytime?