After moving here from lemmy.world after learning of their view on federation with Threads, I now face a dilemma which I do not have a clear answer to.
Should I continue contributing to my niche communities on Instances federating with Threads, or build similar communities on other Instances blocking Threads?
I have a feeing this issue is not a one off, but a common one going forward, so it’s better to settle it once and for all. Below is my thought so far. What would you do in my case?
I love to post or comment on my favourite niche communities to share my experience with others and grow them. Those communities are small in size and they usually exist in certain instances only.
One one hand, having everyone in the same place would be much more beneficial since the community is not split and spread across the fediverse. We would also have better discussions with people from different background and diverse point of views.
On the other hand, I do not feel my contribution is in the right place anymore, if let’s say I post on lemmy.world. I don’t want Threads to benefit from my posts/comments and I want people to join Lemmy. Why would Threads users join Lemmy if they could subsribe to our communities?
I wish my communities were instance-independent so this barrier can be removed. I can create a similar community here but it is the last thing I would want to do.
Having written all these down, I realised this was exactly the same situation how I came to Lemmy from reddit, i.e. communities split across Internet due to issues we have with the platform/instance we are on. I guess discussion on platform/instance-independent communities can be a topic of its own
Edit: formatting and clarified my points and updated my question to reflect that
You are overthinking this. If you like green tea, but an instance admin prefers coffee, would you stop posting on every community on that instance? Do you only want to post where people 100% align with your views on everything? I guess not, because then you would have to host a private instance where you only talk to yourself. Therefore, stop overthinking this and keep posting there.
If the question whether somebody federates with Threads or not is THAT important to you, then you already have your answer.
Overall, I really hope we do not come to a point where thoughts like “my instance does not federate with $evilinstance, therefore it’s a good instance. But $otherinstance does, therefore $otherinstance sucks and I’ll avoid everything on $otherinstance” become the norm. Because then we get a clusterfuck.
You made me realise I asked the wrong question. It’s all about Threads. I updated the title and my question. Thank you
As seen on my other comments, I want Lemmy to grow so we can have diverse communities and diverse viewpoints. Why would Threads users join Lemmy if they can just subscribe to instances federating with them. That is why I don’t want to post on instances federating with Threads anymore
I also don’t want Threads to benefit from my posts/comments
Would you still post to lemmy.world or you would create another community on lemmy.ml where Threads is blocked, if you were in my case?
Why would Threads users join Lemmy if they can just subscribe to instances federating with them. That is why I don’t want to post on instances federating with Threads anymore
I also don’t want Threads to benefit from my posts/comments
I see.
Would you still post to lemmy.world or you would create another community on lemmy.ml where Threads is blocked, if you were in my case?
I understand your problem. It’s an interesting thought-experiment. Though I am not a fan of Meta/Threads either, it probably is not that dear to my heart as it is to you. You’ll have to decide this based upon how important the situation with Threads really is to you. If it’s a matter of principle, you probably would not continue posting to lemmy.world. That said, as it’s niche communities you are talking about, creating new ones on other instances will create a split, which is most likely not helpful for user engagement. Who knows, if Threads will bring many users, it might actually help bring life to niche communities.
Of course, you do have every right to create another community somewhere else, my gut tells me it will not be successful though. I just don’t think many will be like “Oh there is a new community for this hosted on an instance not federating with Threads, let’s move!”. Users, overall, will probably gravitate towards the community with the most activity and it’s not likely that it will be your new one. However, you may have a chance if it there is hardly any activity now.
This is the answer I was looking for. You mentioned a couple of very interesting points and they are well articulated.
Do you post anywhere that I can follow?
Thanks. Yes and no. I do from time to time, but I don’t want this account to be associated with those. I do hope though that on Lemmy more communities for non-tech related content will take off eventually, for example Philosophy and Meditation etc. Civil discussions, no flame wars, no spite, no hive-minded downvote(or upvote) brigades for all your interests would be a dream, how realistic this vision is with growing users is the question. Nevertheless, we are not at the point to worry about this yet.
Hey Pandora, I think you left your box …
What are you even talking about, here?
That’s the good thing with federation. You can participate in communities without visiting the instance even once.
What if I don’t want to post on lemmy.world anymore, because I don’t want Threads to benefit from my posts/comments.
I want people to come to Lemmy for its contents. Why would Threads users join Lemmy if they can subscribe to our communities instead?
Current implementation seems to focus on administrative domains for control, like email servers with individual policies and reputations. What if we look at this the other way?
People have different value systems. Are you ok with promotion for monetary gain? (No never / only individual contributors promoting themselves / only small businesses and below / yes) Are you annoyed by $controversial_topic? Do you dislike when bored people make a conversation game out of someone else’s need for obscure technical help?
The details can be decided later by people smarter than me. The point, though, is that these value systems aren’t universal. Users should decide their own.
Meta interactions (up down report friend block) should be aligned to these values. My client would gather meta-mod data as well as votes/comments. I could easily configure my client to hide things, or group similar distractions together and show/hide them all together. Your client could work differently.
I have no idea how we would possibly implement this with federation. Civically minded users create a meta-moderation identity with a PGP key, sign and publish their decisions, and let people choose to trust them based on past behavior?
Probably still flawed, susceptible to karma farming and cashing out. If well known mods start betraying their users, the bad activities are signed and can be used as proof they can no longer be trusted, though it could take days to get people to stop trusting someone.
Even the whole value system idea can be subverted. Dog whistles, toxic in-jokes, things which are offensive in context but seem fine judged later out of context, etc.
But I want this for us all. (And I vaguely remember seeing something similar on slashdot in the 90s) I have no idea if Lemmy can even support it though.
Please ELI5 for idiots like me. What’s the problem now with lemmy.world?
They will federate with Threads. If I continue posting on lemmy.world, Threads will benefit from it and Threads users would never join Lemmy because they could subscribe to our communities. But I also don’t want to split my niche communities
To be clear, lemmy.world isn’t federating with Threads. They’re taking the wait-and-see approach, which means that they’ll make that decision later.
I’m not happy with that decision, but it is distinctly different from saying that they will federate with Threads.
According to Lemmy documentation, if they don’t block a server, it means they are federating (aka talking using ActivityPub protocol) with that server.
Lemmy has three types of federation:
- Allowlist: Explicitly list instances to connect to.
- BlockList: Explicitly list instances to not connect to. Federation is open to all other instances.
- Open: Federate with all potential instances.
Federation is enabled by default.
It means Meta could in theory talking right now with instances not blocking them as part of their testing.
I don’t know why they could not just block in the first place, then unblock/allow later if it makes sense.
Hm, my understanding from Lemmy.world’s post was “guys, we’re years away from it if it ever happens, maybe we should chill until we learn more?”
My personal bet is that Threads will never actually implement ActivityPub anyway. The announcement of it sounds great for shareholders to see a differentiation with Twitter on the short term, but making it really has so many uncontrollable scale hurdles that I’d bet it will be given up before it’s real.
But whether my guess is correct or not, Lemmy.world admin’s point is factually correct: right now, this whole thing is just a lot of hot air.
(Also, I’m intrigued, I think you might be the only person, when moving instance out of disagreement with an admin, to join one where the admins are known to be Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea. With the point of Lemmy to have very diverse viewpoints, obviously that’s all your choice and you should be where you think you should be, but of all instances out there to join to seek alignment with admins, I wouldn’t have thought Lemmy.ml would be one people would turn to a lot, since it’s been controversial exactly for that, and there are many many others. Heh, you do you.)
the admins are known to be Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea
Do you have a link for this? I want to read it. I picked lemmy.ml because it was used by Memmy app community, has decent userbase, and they block threads.net. This is the description on https://join-lemmy.org/instances : “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”
my understanding from Lemmy.world’s post was “guys, we’re years away from it if it ever happens, maybe we should chill until we learn more?”
Did they post their official’s stance on it? All I saw was a post by ruud, the instance owner on Mastodon
As I explained in another comment, if they don’t block a server, they are federating with it. Meta could be testing as we speak
Yeah, I initially thought it was a rumor, but then I was shown the receipts, and unfortunately it’s true: https://lemmy.world/comment/562635 It is really disappointing…
About the Lemmy.world situation, here’s where I draw my understanding from: https://lemmy.world/post/1274909 Meta said they wouldn’t even start looking at it before being at 1 billion users, so they are not going to be testing anything any time soon; which is also why I’m not buying too strongly that they actually intend to do it. I commented on the post with my thinking. Once they’re that far along (if they even get there), they will have proven their currently implemented strategy, that they don’t actually need to federate with anything to do the Twitter-but-better that they clearly set out to do. I’m totally guessing though so I could be wrong.
Meta started working with ActivityPub working group already
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2023Jul/0032.html
So, they’re spiking on it, which isn’t particularly surprising at this stage. In fact they have to since they’re a public company, they can’t make announcements that they’re spending R&D on something, and not spend it, that would be SEC fraud. I’m still not buying that it’s in their interest enough that they would actually put it out there. This feels like such a heavy engineering lift, for little upside besides the compelling differentiation story to tell.
Also, based on their communications so far, they mean to federate with Mastodon, but they don’t care much about Lemmy. Which makes sense, their shareholders have massively heard of Mastodon, but not Lemmy. Even if they release something, I bet it will be federation with some specific Mastodon servers that they know will treat them well.
Maybe I’m wrong, that’s completely possible. If they start federating with Lemmy.world, I’m squarely in the “then we should defederate now” camp. But at this point this feels like so much hot air and speculation, that I’m not even sure why it’s being talked about so much.
I am sure they will come after reddit next :)
Edit: regarding people’s interest in this, many projects/people have been burnt before by megacorps so its definitely worth having our guard up to anticipate what might happen in the future
I’ll answer on general grounds.
I don’t think that there’s a single correct answer for that. Each case is a case; you need to balance how important are your political views vs. centralisation for you, and decide your course of action.
A few highlights:
- The difference between a bag of spilling versus putting your eggs in different baskets is just point of view. More comms about the same topic = if one of them goes down, the others still survive.
- Users can subscribe to multiple comms with the same topic. That’s what I do with cooking comms, for example - !cooking@lemmy.world, !cooking@lemmy.ml, !food@beehaw.org, I’m in all of them, and I (as a user) see no problem with this.
- Somewhere down the road I predict that the devs will going to allow users (or perhaps the mods) to “group” comms across instances, to visualise their content together. So the bag of spilling will get better over time.
- Remember that comms don’t just abide to the instance rules, they also set up their own rules. If your issue with the instance is that it lacks a specific rule that you feel to be important, you might want to talk with its mods to actively set that rule up.
Based on that I think that the problem is smaller than it looks like. If you don’t like the comm about that topic, for whatever reason (including the instance that it’s hosted on), by all means, create another elsewhere.
Sorry I asked the wrong question. I’ve updated it. My question should have been specific to Threads federation. You can see my clarifie point of view in another comment
Would this change your answer
On broad strokes my answer is still the same, we need to weight both things. It’s just that in the case of Threads the political factor weights too much, for anyone who cares about the Fediverse, that “build your own comm elsewhere, don’t use Threads or instances federating with it” should be the default answer.
There’s a really big difference though between communities splitting off Reddit and split from an instance here. I still have my Lemmy.world account but I’m defaulting now to this one. Lemmy.world is a great starting point for people to branch from and pick from there.
You can still access your communities without visiting the instance.
I totally get that but I want to grow Lemmy and want users to join Lemmy. They won’t if they could just subscribe to our communities. Plus I don’t want threads to benefit from my content if I post to instances federating with Threads
Sorry but: TLDR
I thought I made my question clear
Should I continue contributing to my niche communities on Instances I do not share my view with, or build similar communities on other Instances?
For example runeterra community only exists on lemmy.world, but I don’t want to post on lemmy.world anymore, because I don’t want Threads to benefit from my posts/comments. I want people to come to Lemmy.
Should I create a new runeterra community lemmy.ml instead (lemmy.ml blocks Threads)? What would you do?
