And now, to complete the set, please read my infosec blog. This one doesn't go to Never Gonna Give You Up. You may wish it did.
The fediverse is a privacy nightmare, completely independent of anything Meta might or might not do with it, and nobody seems to really want to engage with that.
I did the requisite responsible reading about Threads federating, and I decided to domain block them after thinking about it.
Anybody who wants to view my public posts can still view them.
This is mostly an infosec account, and there's AFAIK zero infosec community presence on Threads.
I'm not really interested in helping Threads grow an infosec community presence.
I don't think there's any Mastodon admin ready for the network effects of several million users suddenly joining the network. There is shockingly little discussion about problems like coordinated inauthentic activity, which are going to come at that scale. I'm REALLY not interested in seeing or interacting in any way with chinese state disinformation campaigns lol
Mastodon servers and clients are held together by duct tape and prayers by people in their spare time. Threads is held together by people paid full time salaries at a large multinational corporation. Threads can make a better fediverse app and a better fediverse server than anything that currently exists. I think any future where people start downloading the Threads app as their default client to interact with the fediverse, and where people start using threads.net as their default server, is one that is very dangerous for the existence of the fediverse as a set of interoperable clients and servers built on open standards. I'm doing my part to make this as unappealing and as high friction as possible 🫡
fuck libs of tiktok, and fuck threads which is currently platforming them. The impact of accounts like Libs of TikTok on rolling back LGBTQ rights in the real world is a very good example of why network effects, discoverability, and social media amplification are dangerous.
Thanks to @jerry for letting people on this instance make this choice themselves. Having this kind of choice is a welcome change from other social networks.
I don’t believe the EEE narrative about Threads federation. The number of #fediverse citizens isn’t large enough to justify the (substantial) investment in Fedi/Masto/ActivityPub interop if the goal is just to bring them to Meta. @mosseri explicitly said that the goal was to enable people to move off Threads and I believe him, because…
A poll: if you're planning on blocking Threads , do you want your posts to federate there so that hate groups can interact with them and Meta can track you?
The way blocking works on Mastodon, if your instance hasn't enabled "authorized fetch", blocking Threads won't actually prevent your posts from federating there if somebody on another instance who hasn't blocked Threads boosts your post. This means that anybody on Threads can still potentially see your posts, including hate groups like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers. And Meta's privacy policy says they'll use the information to target advertising and improve their products by training AIs. And most large Mastodon instances today haven't turned on authorized fetch.
If you're planning on -- or considering -- blocking Threads, do you still want your posts to federate there?
As a server admin, what are the things you would like to know before applying a domain block (and/or a #blocklist), or what kinds of steps would you like to perform?
Some of my thoughts:
How many people would be impacted on our server and theirs?
How significant the impact would be for those impacted?
People who have created a fediverse account for your lab: how did you decide on a server?
We want to share our research updates with a lab account, but there are so many considerations to make regarding moderation, federation, donation, visibility, etc etc 🫨
An essay on why the #TwitterMigration failed, some things to learn for the next time it's a possibility, and some thoughts on things that the #RedditMigration has done differently, especially with #Kbin.
I have closed my public instance, finecity.social, binned my account there and moved back to mastodon.social. My bots will keep running on calckey.bloonface.com but I won't use that site for anything else any more.
I have fallen out of love with #Mastodon and #fedi in a big way, I don't intend to use it much any more. The past couple of weeks has crystallised that this isn't really a platform I like much.
When you invite a friend to the fediverse, do it with an invite to a specific server (invite link if it's closed, and server link if open) you think they'd enjoy.
This is more likely to help them find a good home on here, and not end up on any of the big poorly managed servers.
I'm (not) sorry if this sounds like gatekeeping, but if you aren't technical enough and/or don't have the time to administrate an instance properly, please do not host a fediverse server. At the very least, don't allow open registrations or keep it single-user.
I've seen users losing their entire social graph due to instances randomly shutting down or losing their data, which is unfair to those users and paints a negative light of fediverse. And now, we're seeing the entire fediverse bogged down with spam because of instances that fail to mitigate bots, affecting the experience of everyone else.
In a related light, it's concerning how a small group of actors (at least based on our internal intelligence) can degrade the experience of the fediverse this effectively. It signals that we have a have a long ways to go in terms of the technologies, strategies, and tools we use to mitigate bad actors in the fediverse. What we currently have isn't enough for a resilient fediverse.
The thing about ActivityPub, the greatest social networking protocol ever devised, is that it's so obviously brilliant and resilient that it should be the backbone of every single social service going, but also if Threads interfaces with it even slightly, the whole thing will collapse and be full of ads and unusable. That's just how it works and the people pushing this sort of crap are not catastrophising at all. #meta#fedimeta
Since the previous post went down so swimmingly, here's one explaining why pretty much everything everyone is saying about Meta joining the fediverse is silly and/or nonsensical.
Soon to come - why fedi is a complete privacy nightmare that you absolutely shouldn't use if you want to to retain even the slightest semblance of control over your posts.
People are still on Twitter. People are going to stay on Twitter until they have a good reason to leave, one that they see as a good reason. There's been a lot of discourse about what we can do to get them to switch, and while we might come up with reasons that are compelling to ourselves, anybody who's been in a forum in the midst of some great controversy (say, Low End Talk when it was revealed to be a ColoCrossing property, or any of the angsty HackForums clones when some issue with a very verbose member or the administration inevitably fucks something up) knows you are going to lose some people, not just in not knowing the new place exists, but also in that maybe they want something new, but maybe not so stringent in their views in things.
Maybe things truly are better here, maybe things can improve, maybe it's Maybelline. Whatever the case, I think it's fair to point out that there are people who think the fediverse has failed, people that I wholeheartedly believe would be better off here. But they have to be the ones to make the decision themselves to come here on their own. All we really can do is remind them subtly that we still exist here, and to continue to be kind to each other, continue to reject hate, and continue to welcome the noobs into the fold when they do make the decision.
And maybe fight for a union, because god damn working conditions in the US suck.
DID YOU KNOW that if Threads users can look at your toots then it allows Mark Zuckerberg to travel across the Internet and molest your instance with his unknowable sex organ or "proboscis", permanently tainting it in the eyes of the Lord? This is just one of the many very real and not at all imaginary ways in which this could cause a problem. #meta#threads#zuckerberg#proboscis#fedimeta
Seems there are a lot of people on fedi now that are absolutely fucking clueless that for the last 6 or so years we’ve been enjoying being away from bullshit corporate surveillance advertising platforms.
Absolutely blows my mind they have no idea why this network even exists, why we all moved here.
I am gobsmacked that people have found their way here that are actually this thick.
Please include your pronouns in your bio. :otter_peek: It's such a necessity when trying to figure out how to address people.
Plus, if you're using the Mastodon app or one of its forks, you can have a "Pronouns" section and it'll appear next to your username in the home feed. It's very useful. :meowuwu:
When thinking about #moderation, federation, and #defederation, it's important to center why we are engaging in these activities in the first place: to make decisions about interpersonal boundaries and accountability.
Accountability is a practice of honoring connection and repairing harm through active listening and mutual acknowledgement of context and power.
so misskey.io announced they're introducing a temporary measure against the spambots by ignoring all posts, boosts, replies and whatnot from other instances, UNLESS a user from a different instance is followed by someone on misskey.io
if you wanna maintain communication with misskey.io's users you should make an account from there and follow your main that is on another instance (the announcement itself recommends this method)
The only thing more sus than the Zuck worship on #threads, are the high-profile tech bros in the comments, who are definitely not on the #Meta payroll, trying to convince us that this is normal.
Not sure if other people do this, but I use notifications of favorites/boosts as a discovery mechanism for accounts to possibly follow.
I mean it's a potential sign they have similar interests, so might as well visit the profile and see if they post interesting stuff you want to see more of.
I'll often favorite a few posts along the way too, which I hope doesn't seem too weird to people!
This figure is probably still dominated by DNS requests according to Cisco, so I wouldn't rely on it yet. (I'm not even sure what domain names the mobile app is contacting.)