The fediverse is discussing if we should defederate from Meta’s new Threads app. Here’s why I probably won’t (for now).
(Federation between plume and my lemmy instance doesn’t work correctly at the moment, otherwise I would have made this a proper crosspost)
What on earth is Plume?
What exactly is Threads?
How does any of this work?
I thought I had a handle on what Mastodon was, but then there was this threads thing, and Lemmy is apparently also part of the Fediverse but not Mastodon, I assume, and Threads is its own thing, and calckey and kbin exist, maybe, and I’d never heard of Plume until this post…I don’t understand any of this. Reddit and Twitter are how I would generally follow this sort of happening but Mastodon and Lemmy are ghost towns I don’t really understand how to use. I’m so utterly lost I don’t even know where to begin with finding answers. I don’t even have known unknowns, just unknown in unknowns.
What people call “the Fediverse” is a collection of web applications that talk to each other through an open standard called ActivityPub. ActivityPub defines what users, groups, posts, comments and likes are, how you can subscribe to them and how they travel between instances. People have built different software packages that all use ActivityPub but have different user interfaces to feel similar to different “traditional” platforms. Mastodon is like Twitter, Mastodon and kbin are similar to Reddit, PeerTube is similar to YouTube, Pixelfed is similar to Instagram or Flickr and Plume is a long form blogging platform similar to Medium or older versions of Wordpress. Because they all use the same protocol under the hood, they can generally talk to each other. The user experience isn’t great yet but you can already use your Mastodon account to post to a lemmy community or to comment on a Plume post. Imagine it a bit like email where Gmail’s web interface, MS Outlook, Thunderbird and dozens of other clients exist as well as several different Mail servers. They can all talk to each other even though they were written by different people and all have their own interpretation and extensions to the SMTP and IMAP standards that define how emails work
Threads is a new microblogging Application by Meta (Facebook / Instagram) that will probably work very similar to Mastodon. In contrast to most other fediverse applications, Threads won’t be open source but will still use ActivityPub so it will be able to talk to existing open source applications. People here are afraid that they will abuse that to spy on people or systematically archive everything that happens in the fediverse in order to sell your data or train AI with it. They propose that we defederate from Threads (meaning we block our instances from talking to Threads’ instance). My post contains my thoughts on why that isn’t as useful as people think it is.
Hope that helps. If you still have questions, I’m happy to answer them to the best of my knowledge.
Lemmy is a piece of software. Lemmy software is a link aggregator - same as reddit.
So you’re signed up to an instance of Lemmy which is installed on the server at lemmy.ml - this means that the server you signed up to (lemmy.ml) is running a copy of the Lemmy software. Other servers also run the Lemmy software making them also instances of Lemmy. As well as you being able to talk to users in Communities on the lemmy.ml server, you can talk to users in Communities on other Lemmy instances. For example, I’m registered on the server at lemmy.world
KBin is also link aggregator software, just like Lemmy and Reddit. Same things apply there, same software on multiple servers, all able to talk with each other.
Mastodon software is a microblogging service - same as Twitter (and Threads). Just like instances of Lemmy, instances of Mastodon can talk to each other. So a user on mastodon.world can talk to (for example) a user on kolektiva.social which is also running the Mastodon software.
Plume is blogging software - like WordPress, but just like Lemmy and Mastodon, it can be installed on multiple servers, all of which can talk to each other.
There’s also Pixelfed (Instagram), PeerTube (YouTube), Friendica (Facebook) and a large variety of others.
Now, as well as all these different types of software (Lemmy, Mastodon, KBin, PixelFed etc) being able to talk to other instances of the same software on other servers, because they are all underpinned by a single method of passing information called ActivityPub, each type of software can also talk to each other - so you as a Lemmy user can also see posts (like the one you and I are responding to) from a user on a server running an instance of Plume. Some people here are commenting from a Mastodon instance. All these things are loosely joined together making a joined (federated) universe - the fediverse.
don’t lose your head over this. lemmy, kbin, mastodon and apparently threads (the new twitter alternative by facebook/meta) are all part of the fediverse, which means they all follow a decentralised approach. mastodon and threads are microblogging platforms, while kbin and lemmy have a similar format to reddit. because they are all part of the fediverse, all these platforms communicate with each other and you can use kbin to subscribe to microblogs such as mastodon and have them appear in your feed. defederation basically means cutting the link between one server and another, so they can’t communicate anymore.
How does that even make sense? They’re completely different types of content.
If Threads is just another Mastodon instance why does anyone care?
If everything is just decentralised instances what are kbin and Lemmy, exactly? They’re not instances in themselves, are they?
@koberulz @murphys_lawyer
Threads isn’t just another Mastodon instance. Threads uses a similar format to Mastodon, and they may communicate with each other, but the similarities stop there. Threads will probably have some proprietary features to make it “stand out” from the others. Also, if many people jump on board Threads, the thing is that Meta will then have a monopoly on the Fediverse, which is the exact thing the Fediverse is trying to extinguish: Monopolies controlled by corporations.
The “monopoly on the Fediverse” argument is something that I explicitly wanted to counter in my post. The fact is, Threads will become one of the largest if not the largest instance in the Fediverse, if we federate with them or not. Their users don’t sign up to Threads to talk to us, they sign up because it’s the hot new thing from Meta. If we defederate right away, they become their own bubble, their users never know we’re there and they can do to their platform whatever they want.
But if we federate with them as long as they play (relatively) nice, their users will get used to being able to talk to us which gives us leverage. They will be bound to use the same protocol as us or their users will complain about not being able to talk some of their friends anymore and maybe even migrate to an open alternative. And if they still want to go through with a change we don’t like, we can still refuse to implement it.
Our choice is not between Meta having a monopoly on the Fediverse and everything being as we want it. It’s between them having an alternative to the fediverse that will overtake us within weeks and having a slim chance at being treated as equals.
While I agree that it is probably better to not defederate them right from the start, I believe that the Fediverse might not have that much leverage. This recent blog post about the history of XMPP describes it pretty well: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Of course it’s different because this is social media and not just 1:1 privat messages. But for us to actually have some leverage/impact we have to generate a lot of (good) content so that Threads users will actually notice and complain if that content “vanishes”. And at the same time we must not become too dependent on their content
As I said elsewhere: this would still have been the case if Google hadn’t used XMPP in the first place. All those people you have lost when Google defederated either wouldn’t have been on XMPP at all or care enough about privacy and open source to have both. It’s not like you have lost anyone who had been there before Google started using XMPP. Same with Threads. Every single user who is on the fediverse today will still be here if they defederate (unless they leave for other, unrelated reasons of course). Considering our existing userbase’s interests, I don’t see many people giving up their existing accounts in favor of a Threads account.