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vaguerant

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Defederation, Threads and You ( kbin.social )

A lot of us are pretty new to the fediverse and we've arrived just in time to grapple with what is easily the biggest federation/defederation controversy ever to hit it. I've put this thread together to hopefully help communicate some of the more complex ideas that we're trying to get our heads around....

vaguerant OP ,
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No, I don't want to? Weird take.

vaguerant OP ,
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Thanks, I appreciate it! It took a stupidly long time. :V

On some level, it's probably not that important that people understand all this stuff, but I think the most dangerous thing is people believing that their data will be protected if Threads gets defederated. Any other confusion is basically harmless, but that's the one thing where people have a false sense of security, because Meta has exactly the same access to your data whether or not they get defederated.

vaguerant OP ,
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For the most part, Threads content just wouldn't appear on Lemmy at all. It's like how you can't see Mastodon users' timelines on Lemmy. e.g. Jeri Ryan from Star Trek is on mastodon.world, but you can't read her blog from Lemmy because it just doesn't display microblog content, only stuff that's sorted into groups (communities).

The one exception is that Jeri Ryan can track down the equivalent group on her Mastodon instance and "microblog" directly into the group. Mastodon has some hacky tweaks to do things like reading the first sentence as a heading, the second line as a URL, and the third line as the post body, so if you're especially dedicated you can post to Lemmy from Mastodon. If Threads cares enough, they could add similar functionality to Threads to make it technically possible to post to Lemmy as long as you try hard enough, but just regular people's blog posts on Threads won't display on Lemmy at all.

It is not Lemmy or kbin, it is the fediverse. ( kbin.social )

I don't think many people understand that if they use Lemmy or kbin, they are posting to the fediverse. There are other platforms and will be more to come. Referring to a post on "Lemmy" or "kbin" is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer....

vaguerant ,
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I think the portmanteau "threadiverse" works for this situation and it's what I've been using to refer to anything in the general Lemmy/kbin side of the fediverse, but I think people just referring to the platform is inevitable. People talk about posts "on Mastodon" even though there's like 15 different services you can use to post to the blogging side of the fediverse, like Pleroma, pump.io, etc. It's worth thinking about in situations where you're like "Hi Lemmy" because you're definitely talking to more than just Lemmy, but any time you're talking about your personal experience of where you saw a thread I think it's perfectly accurate to use the name of that platform rather than having to say you saw it "on the fediverse".

vaguerant ,
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Busted! I have been thinking about how "threadiverse" is complicated a lot by Threads existing. It could easily mean "the part of the fediverse that is attached to Threads" (uppercase) rather than "the part of the fediverse that revolves around threads" (lowercase). Maybe we already need a new name. Eggheadiverse?

Question: Why are some instances defederating instances which don't sign the fedipact? ( kbin.social )

Something I don't understand currently about the whole Meta/Threads debacle is why I'm seeing talk about instances which choose to federate with Threads themselves being defederated. I have an account on mastodon.social, one of the instances which has not signed the fedipact, and I've had people from other instances warn me that...

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