This post at the top of the community homepage explains and answers all of my issues.

  1. The idea of the Fediverse is that you can fed with and defed from any instances as an instance moderator, OR just block a particular instance on a personal level. Right?

If yes, then why is Threads fedding up being viewed as such a big issue? I am not saying I like it. I’m just wondering what the actual issue is and what the real threat is that they pose? I read some comments saying that if Threads feds up, then they could pull the numbers and this gain some sort of majority that would lead to a control over the Fediverse… But, isn’t the point of the Fediverse that people can just stay away from an instance if they don’t like it and still interact with the people?

  1. Also, our posts on any instance are public. So even if we defed from a particular instance, wouldn’t our posts still be accessible? I read that Threads can access our information. The publicly available information on the Fediverse is mostly just usernames and the posts we make. That’s available regardless of them wanting it, right?

I’m looking to understand the issue, not spark a fight. Please. Let’s talk it over and not start being asses.

Remember, a different opinion isn’t the end of the world.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
    4·
    6 months ago
    1. Instance moderators can block individual servers, as can account owners on services like Mastodon.
      • People are afraid that Threads will suck up all their posts and do something bad with them (privacy violations of some kind? not sure what the problem is when the content is already out there for anyone to crawl and analyse). People are also afraid that this will be another XMPP, and that the popularity of Threads will overwhelm the small Fediverse.
    XMPP??

    XMPP is a federated messaging protocol that Google and Facebook adopted at some point; Google’s/Facebook’s implementations became much more popular, the majority of the XMPP network was on those services, and when XMPP was phased out, XMPP shrunk back to the tiny userbase of enthusiasts that it originally comprised of. It has grown to be actually useful since then but neither Google nor Facebook have enabled XMPP again (i.e. you can actually keep your chat history on multiple devices, E2EE has been added, some standards have been grouped together to make the protocol more palatable). However, with MIMI+MLS on the horizon, I imagine XMPP users will be able to talk to Facebook/GChat users in the future.

    1. Yes, Meta can already access and scrape most content on the Fediverse if they wanted to. The exceptions Mastodon and services that copied Mastodon’s solution, which have a setting to only allow fetching posts for logged-in users or from servers that sign requests, effectively allowing the administrators to choose which servers can access their content at the cost of posts being inaccessible on the website without a local account.
      • Public information received by a partaking ActivityPub server includes usernames, display names, post contents, edit history upvotes/downvotes/favourites, boosts, and some other activity. Scrapers cannot find out who upvoted posts and in many cases who favourited posts but by scraping across different servers, it’s possible to figure out what accounts are liking what posts.
      • Something that many Mastodon operators have done is limit or silence Threads; basically, you can follow Threads users and interact with them, but their content will not appear on any algorithmic timeline and accounts on those servers will not be suggested to new users. Lemmy has no such ability at the moment, but I can’t imagine Threads interacting with Lemmy in the first place; we can’t even follow accounts on Lemmy, as far as I know following a Lemmy community through Threads would be as useless and spammy as it is on Mastodon. At the moment Threads users can’t follow Fediverse users anyway, they’ve only enabled outgoing traffic so far.