this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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[–] BertramDitore 53 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That’s the first time I’ve seen Lemmy mentioned in an article from a respectable tech outlet. Exciting! We need more like Ars.

But also, muck feta.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

Ars Technica seems to really be embracing the fediverse. They have a very active official Mastodon account. https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, Threads can do all it wants. I've set a preemptive block. I want nothing to do with Threads. Of course, I cannot control what other instances decide to federate and get my content that way. But I won't make it easy for them.

[–] Moogosa 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

What steps did you take to preemptively block it? I want nothing to do with Threads either but am a bit confused on what I should be doing. Is there a list of instances who defederated from threads or something?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I run my own instance so I simply added a block in the instance configuration. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say the folks at lemmy.world have most likely done the same.

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

No need to guess, just look at https://lemmy.world/instances

If anything was being blocked you would see it there. AFAIK lemmy.world does not normally block/defederate anyone as a standard policy (including threads.net).

If you want an example on the other end of the spectrum go see https://beehaw.org/instances they are currently at 405 instances being blocked including threads.net.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Ah thanks for letting me know about that. I thought the instances view was only for admins.

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

I don't think any Lemmy instance is going to have to block Threads.

Mostly because Lemmy doesn't support microblogging. Kbin does. And the big one is Mastodon.

All because ActivityPub is not a monolith, different services use different parts of the standard.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I've preemptively blocked threads on my Mastodon instance as well.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I appreciate that the article mentioned that Threads isn't federated and these claims often never materialize, because I feel like this is the most important fact, and it's barely discussed.

Threads is not federated. There's nothing to defederate from, and it's unclear if there ever will be.

All the benefits of embracing activitypub are provided by announcing adoption, and all the downsides only materialize by actually doing the hard part. Based on experience and logic I think federation will happen far, far in the future if ever.

[–] BertramDitore 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All the benefits of embracing activitypub are provided by announcing adoption, and all the downsides only materialize by actually doing the hard part.

Well said. It wouldn't take much to convince me that this was their strategy all along.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yeah, that's exactly what I think is the strategy.

If I were the VP or whatever in charge of this -- which means that I'm assuming I'm a dishonest corporate shill -- I'd create a roadmap to integrating activitypub that includes the very most basic functionality as the first deliverable, then any usability or UX features as round two deliverables. Then I'd tell the project manager to plan for an open-ended "assessment" period between completing round one and starting round two, and tell them to move on to other tasks until further notice,

IF they ever finish, you just announce that it's technically possible for someone on Mastadon to query the Threads server and vice-versa, but, like there's no way to actually find people on Mastadon servers in Threads or follow them, and vice-versa, and then leave it that way. And that assumes the project doesn't just get suspended at some point and left that way.

[–] BertramDitore 3 points 1 year ago

Diabolical. And entirely believable.

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

I’m incredibly surprised that Wired (the original source) didn’t mention that there’s precedent for the fediverse’s concerns in Gchat/XAMPP

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Because there aren't. That was a dumb blog post.

If Google Talk never supported XMPP it still would have had millions of users and XMPP would have died years earlier. That wasn't EEE, that was Google keeping an open protocol alive for a while until they decided not to.