this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
1286 points (98.3% liked)

Technology

59669 readers
3663 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 427 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Repeat after me: I will not federate with any Meta products.

[–] DaCrazyJamez 163 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I will not federate with any meta products.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I will not federate with any meta products.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I will not federate with any meta products.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I will not federate with any meta products

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I will not federate with any meta products

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I will not federate with any meta products

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I will not federate with any meta products

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

I will not federate with any meta products

[–] [email protected] 60 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Serious question: how do we - the end users - stop federating with Meta?

[–] [email protected] 135 points 8 months ago (11 children)

Move to an instance that won't.

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] [email protected] 77 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] bonobi 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

How does one find a list of instances that aren't federated with meta?

[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Appreciate the link! Glad to see that both my mastodon and lemmy instances have already blocked their content.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

What's the difference between blocked and fedipact?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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"

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

I think fedipact actually sign the pack to block and the others just blocked.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

~~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

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Not sure anyone posted this in direct reply to you - https://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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 50 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

@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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Youtube was blocking comments mentioning Fediverse and ActivityPub 2 years ago way before all the exposure the Fediverse got last year. Facebook was blocking links to mastodon instances also before all that. There is absolutely no way a very specific word such as Pixelfed would be blocked "accidentally", how do you propose such accidental block would even be possible? Oops, intern smashed his butt against a keyboard and set a filter that happened to catch Pixelfed by accident? Come on.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

You need more training in corporate risk management, grasshopper! AP/AtProto isn't a revenue opportunity, it's a potential front for which they'll need to have a battle-ready product and brand. Ever heard the saying 'engagement is containment'?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Wait did I miss something big? Does Lemmy now federate with Mastodon somehow? How does that work?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Always has. Anything using ActivittPub can interoperate

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I was under the impression that it theoretically could but wasn’t set up in a way that made this possible. But perhaps I was mistaken.

How do I access Mastodon content using my account here then?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Threads hasn't had federation enabled until now, but you've always been able to interact with Mastodon... sort of. The Lemmy UI doesn't really have a good way of finding Mastodon posts that don't tag a Lemmy community or of following Mastodon users, but if they do tag a community the Mastodon post will show up as a Lemmy post in that community.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

I see. So functionally it doesn’t really work, at least in this direction.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

You've had some well-meaning but ultimately not quite accurate answers in this thread so just to clarify:

You can follow, post to and interact with Lemmy communities from Mastodon, because they're treated the same way as a "group" on Mastodon in general.

You can NOT follow and interact with Mastodon users from Lemmy, because Mastodon accounts are individual "users" and Lemmy doesn't have the concept of following and interacting with users, only with communities. If Lemmy ever does add a feature to let us follow other users, then in theory following Mastodon users will also become possible.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

@LibertyLizard @technology It always has. They both speak ActivityPub.

The UX can be awkward though. As an example, I had to add the community tag to this comment manually, as it won't federate to lemmy.world otherwise. That's because Mastodon doesn't push replies to every server with users participating in a thread, which I think is a design flaw.

To post to Lemmy from Mastodon, just tag a community. You can load any of the fediverse links shown in the default Lemmy web UI in a Mastodon search box and reply to them. You can also follow a community and receive every subsequent post and comment as a boost (this is a bad UX and I don't recommend it), as well as follow Lemmy users, which you can't do in Lemmy itself. You cannot vote on Lemmy posts/comments from Mastodon.

I find tagging an appropriate Lemmy community from my Mastodon posts to be a good experience. You'll see a few of those from my @zaktakespictures account in @birding, and from @zakreviews in @flashlight.

I'm pretty sure Lemmy won't make new toplevel posts out of this in those communities since it's a reply, but I'm going to check just to be sure.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: [email protected], [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

As far as I know it's always been this way. At least since I joined during the whole reddit fiasco

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

How do you access Mastodon content in Lemmy?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It doesn't work so well in that direction. Lemmy doesn't have a concept of content that isn't posted to a community. If a Mastodon post tags a Lemmy community, it's available as a normal Lemmy post, but otherwise it doesn't exist.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

FWIW I think this is intentional and a feature, not a bug. By spreading content to communities, you can delegate moderation responsibility much easier.

Content not posted to any community would need something akin to a site-wide moderator or an admin to moderate, and such a moderator wouldn't be as effective. They'd cover a wider array of very different content. Community moderators work better because they can define rules that are only confined to their comm and they know better how to moderate their own community and they also care more about their own community so are more motivated to keep it well-moderated in the fashion they want.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

I didn't fully understand what I was talking about when I replied, and for that I apologize. Now that I know a little bit more, this is basically how it works (I think):

We cannot see posts made directly on Mastodon. However, they can see posts made on Lemmy and even comment on them. We are able to see those comments as normal and without doing anything on our end, but again, that's only as long as they're made under Lemmy posts

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago

I will not mederate with any Feta products.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

after me: I will not federate with any Meta products.