The interesting thing about Twitter is how it shows how a significant part of our society works. It is kind of about amplifying fame and suggesting that we should all cares about meaningless 240 character posts or what these guys think.
That news media types love Twitter is kind of an indictment of how news works.
That's not really true. When it first came out, before the ads, before the algorithm, when they embraced 3rd party apps with an open api, it was really great. It was full of techy personalities and interesting folks. Hashtags were fun to follow, live events were amazing in real time, so much more. That was before it got inundated with politics and celebrities though. I think that honeymoon phase only lasted a tiny while, then it all went downhill into the outrage machine pretty quickly. But for a quick minute there, it was glorious.
Twitter was also an important tool for journalists and researchers worldwide. Military targets have come from Twitter posts. It is a reflection of a huge chunk of society. You may as well call all of internet technology "just a porn box" for how wildly over generalized that statement is. The reality is your generalization comes from arrogance. "I never engaged in such frivolous behavior". You're here now. Yes you have and yes you do.
Even your comment is the first cousin of outrage, it's pure disdain. Nothing more or less, and exactly as valuable as outrage.
I agree - there are plenty of empty magazines setup as subreddit clones. What we really need is a push encouraging content and comment submissions more than anything else. That's what's going to drive the development of a vibrant community on kbin.social.
Generally, unless you have at least 20 pieces of content from multiple users with active commentary, most folks will assume it's a dead community and move on to a bigger community on lemmy.world or similar to find more content. One thing I would suggest for the moderators of growing communities is to always comment on, upvote and boost your contributors' submissions in the beginning stages of community growth. Your personal engagement of the content is the first step in encouraging your readers to do the same.
That being said, I'd love for folks to create more new niche communities that didn't exist on Reddit. There's a lot more freedom here - we should take advantage of it.
I’m a poster on a small magazine and I upvote and boost all posted content. Also, lurkers of small magazines need to just put some content out there! Put you’re voice in! I can almost guarantee you will be well received if it’s relevant and on topic.
It really just depends. I was a lurker (and occasionally commented) in a couple of Pokemon TCG groups on Reddit and I never felt a need to contribute because there was so much content already. I now create posts and comment because I recognize the magazine needs content to thrive. If there are others out there who are the same as me, and want the community to thrive, I don’t think asking them to make content if they can is too much. It’s not anyone is requiring it, but it’s a way to build and give back to your community. And it’s not too hard to do on a Pokémon TCG community, though I can see how it might be difficult on others such as a tech news magazine.
This is definitely a thing. I don’t like making a comment or post that has already been made 80 times, and I’m used to that being the case. Once I get used to the fact that I might be the first one to post something (and possibly the only one who wants to, lol), I will probably get used to posting regularly.
Hashtags exist for that purpose. You can follow them to be put into your home feed. As well, if you use the advanced web interface (like tweet deck), you can create a column with modifiers. Such as, I have a column that searches for both #pixelart and #lowpoly, but excludes posts with #NSFW or #Lewd, as well as #Pokemon (because I have a separate column for pokemon pixel artwork & lowpoly specifically)
I have heard misskey and calckey have a sort of trending feed, but not quite algorithmic, but unsure completely.
I will add that many of us who work remotely using publicly accessible wifi also use VPNs, and Imgur actively blocks IPs from multiple commercial VPN providers. If you want those users to see the image you're sharing, Imgur is not the way to go.
Pixelfed works well with other Fediverse services like Kbin and Lemmy. Try hosting there!
Finally someone who has a clue. That was well written and easy to understand. Thank you for all the work you put into that post!
Defederation is about what an instance allows in, not what an instance allows out. Defederation stops you seeing the defederated instance's content, but it does not stop them seeing your instance's content.
As a final, tiny little point of interest - there is a setting called AUTHORIZED_FETCH (Secure mode) which will force the requesting instance to authenticate. This can be used to stop the data from flowing out.
Of course enabling this is somewhat problematic as it tends to break other things. But it's there.
Thank you for the clarification. I was also confused by that quote (ie: if you can control who’s data your reading… you should be able to control who has access to your data. Of course, this doesn’t include mirroring content and other shady practices, but I don’t think Meta would go down that path to avoid being defederated)
On Mastodon at least, neither authorized fetch, nor "disallow unauthenticated API requests" really stops the outflow. it does in an ActivityPub sense, however, I have both flags activated on my instance, but Mastodon has an RSS feed for every account, by just adding .rss to the profile URL, and anyone can pull that without authentication.
The option to turn off .rss feeds for accounts doesn't exist in a standard mastodon install. the Hometown fork of Mastodon has the option to disable it.
So while the flags above will help prevent random discovery/propagation by others on the Fediverse, there are still open doors for accessing the data, at least on Mastodon. I can't really speak for the other projects.
Mine won't nor will any of my other 3 Fediverse servers.
I know of a number of Mastodon servers that have already de-federated or limited threads.net, even though it does not yet connect to the Fediverse. Some are even limiting or suspending connections to servers that refuse to de-federate from threads.net and are trying to pressure other servers to do the same.
An Admin has no right to force their personal agendas onto all the people who are on their servers. People are competent enough to make their own decisions and can individually decide to block or limit Threads. I block servers on my server to protect members from hateful people.
I will limit threads.net if their moderation is inadequate, just as I do now for a number of Mastodon servers that don't do much to keep hatred and offensive content off their servers. This won't prevent anyone from following someone or being followed by someone, on threads.net. It just means that people on my server need to approve being followed and that posts from threads.net won't show up in the public timeline.
At this point, I haven't heard of any Kbin instances planning to de-federate but there's a ton of yacking about it on Mastodon. I finally muted the "threads" hashtag to get some peace from it.
I disagree that the admin of an instance doesn't have the right to moderate it how they wish. By joining the server you agree to let that admin control what content you see on your instance. That's how instances work. It's still on you to agree/disagree with the admin and how they run the server. That's why other servers exist and you have the complete right to associate with who you wish, or even run your own instance and run it how you like.
I do not agree with the people wanting to control other servers by trying to force defederating from threads. Independent admins running their own server is what the Fediverse is built upon.
I do not agree with the people wanting to control other servers by trying to force defederating from threads. Independent admins running their own server is what the Fediverse is built upon.
As long as authorized fetch is implemented (and correctly), intermediaries can't "leak" messages out anyways. If Threads wanted to read the contents of a boost, they would have to ask your server for that, and your server can tell them to screw off.
Does kbin or Lemmy implement authorized fetch? If they don't they should start working on it. And consider enabling it by default. I know versions of Lemmy >= 0.18 can talk to GTS (which enforces AF) so there is partial support for it. And nobody runs 0.17 because of how inefficient it is, so that won't be too big of a backwards incompatibility issue. No idea how it works on kbin land here, but it should be implemented ASAP if only so that any future enforcement won't break backwards compatibility.
Im not going to deny the threat of Extend/Embrace/Extinguish, but everyone defederating now, and threatening to defederate all other instances that dont do so as well, comes across as an incredible hasty and mostly an emotionally driven decision.
I get that. I'm all for viewing then with suspicion. Rightly and justifiably so. I don't have Facebook or Instagram except for contained osint work. I value privacy and understand it's importance.
But I'm personally not in favour of wildly quarantining every instance that doesn't fully block them before I have had more time to understand the risks and options here. And I think a lot of people here don't do. Not really. In that regard its just classic social media with people stoking each others fears and feasting on it.
And I guess a lot of people are here, fresh from reddits corporate ego trip only to immediately feel the worry of their next digital home inevitably meeting the same fate. I think that fresh trauma is directing a lot of the current discourse here. And I think it would be wise to revisit the subject again when we've settled and understand our new surroundings more.
tl;dr: don't trust facebook, but also don't burn half the street down because they bought a mansion down the lane.
Come on, one thread is all about "if we do nothing now in two years Threads will have swallowed the Internet", and here it's like "if we do something now we're all drama queens".
Personally I think it's all very simple. Meta has an agenda, which is monetizing data through all means available.
This is not up to debate. It's a corporation, it has no morals and no other goal other than generating profit by selling users data to advertisers.
I'm saying this as a statement of facts.
The purpose of the fediverse so far is in complete contrast with that, so I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that Meta's ultimate goal will be to alter the fediverse to suit their own goal.
Therefore, telling them to go fuck themselves while we still can seems like a very reasonable thing to do.
Everyone is free and welcome to make thir own servers, and so is Meta.
However, admins are also free to defederate from the servers they deem dangerous or inappropriate for any reason, and fuck, Meta has shown thousands of times that they're not to be trusted.
Solution: I had somehow subscribed to the DOMAIN kbin.social by mistake. I didn’t even know this was possible. This took a long time figuring out because domain subscriptions can only be seen from the settings page, not from the public facing profile page.
That makes sense now. Glad you figured it out. The question is how you did that to begin with, mainly for reference to avoid others from doing it, unless they want that. But it sort of nullifies the idea of subscriptions. At least if I or other readers of this see someone ever pop up with a similar problem we know where to point them to look.
Fully agreed, and thanks for taking the time to respond to my post. I don't remember how I did it. I think I wanted to subscribe to the magazin kbin and ended up subscribing to the whole domain, too (the timing fits).
While the mistake is certainly on my part, from a usability point of view it would have helped if the two separate subscription lists profile>subscriptions (some features) and settings>subscriptions (all features) would be consolidated into one single list.
When RIF died today a part of me died. But with death comes rebirth, and here we are. Forcibly pushed out of our comfort zones and into the brave new world of the fediverse. I have a feeling I will look upon this day with the same joy and reverence as the day my friend download rif on my phone for me all those years ago. It felt weird at first then became something I used almost every day. I have a feeling the same will happen here. We're all about to create something beautiful. Oh yeah and fuck spez
Can we not like, do that Reddit thing at every turn where a certain topic/title always makes it to the top and everybody just duplicates it even though the exact same conversation happens every time?
I’ve been feeling it too, and have been on the fence about jumping ship. My block list is growing so fast it’s just a touch obscene. So many pill pushers junk websites and… random and science are hit so hard it’s frustrating.
I will be registering elsewhere to see if the experience is any better. I really like the overall direction and design of kbin, but things have been dragging on updates and improvements.
For example, my settings are identical as far as I can tell between desktop and mobile, but my mobile feed is generally hitting day old on the first page while desktop has several pages of more recent content. I walked through the settings side by side and they appear identical.
But I haven't reported it or searched to see if someone else has because of the absence making the effort to document and report less urgent.
I'll keep my account of course and keep an eye out if it picks back up because do like the browser based interface and the combo of lemmy and mastodon in a single feed.
I know the admin here recently had a minor surgery. I'm hoping for some kind of solution for when normal life stuff keeps him away. Like a few people just in charge of getting rid of spammers and worse people.
I came to the Threadiverse because Reddit was closing its APIs and building the walls higher around its garden.
I will be supremely disappointed if the Threadiverse collectively turns around and does the same thing.
Instances should be defederated when they do something harmful. Preemptively defederating is counterproductive, it gives Meta no incentive to do things right.
Yep, the Reddit metaphor really backfired. If Reddit joined the fediverse I would happily consume their content. It would actually be a wonderful compromise where reddit wouldn’t have to provide direct app support and instead just publish out via ActivityPub and people could build third party clients through that.
I left Twitter because they killed Tweetbot and I left Reddit because they killed Apollo. I genuinely hate the experience of those sites with their native apps, and I use these kinds of services almost exclusively on my phone.
While I also hate Elon Musk and Spez, I strongly dislike most tech CEOs so while a motivator, it wasn’t the biggest factor for me. It’s important to remember we’re not all here for the same reason, and user-level instance blocking is the real solution here.
You don’t like some fediverse member? Then block them at the user level and move on, or start your own server and block them there. Don’t force everyone else on your server to not even have the option just for you.
I came to the Threadiverse because Reddit was closing its APIs and building the walls higher around its garden. I will be supremely disappointed if the Threadiverse collectively turns around and does the same thing.
So instances on the fediverse have some obligation to let entities who (A) will control 99% of the content, against our values of a decentralized, more evenly distributed fediverse; (B) have zero interest in an open fediverse; and (C) have all the incentive in the world to prevent its growth and get more people on their own platform to ensure profit? As usually hesitant as I am about preemptive defederation, if the fediverse is to preserve its values of openness and ensure its growth, it can't let in for-profit corporations that will control most of the activity and that go directly against those values of openness we care about so much. Just as tolerance doesn't mean letting in those who are intolerant, an unwalled fediverse can and should put its guards up against those who want to take everything for themselves.
it gives Meta no incentive to do things right
Meta already has zero incentive to do things right. In fact, they have negative incentive, as people being on Mastodon or Kbin instead of Threads actively harms them. You will never see Mark Zuckerberg suggest that people spread out to other instances so that no one gains too much control, but you will see him try to get as many people from the other instances on Threads as possible. We are talking about making our activity dependent on a for-profit tech corporation. If we were way larger so that Threads wouldn't control such a massive portion of activity, I wouldn't be as concerned, but as things stand now, we're letting our content pool be dominated by a company that has interests in direct opposition with ours. I can't see a scenario where any of this ends well.
Nothing makes it special. My point is not that I think Facebook will do no wrong, my point is that it's counterproductive to defederate from them before they've done something wrong.
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