so, I learned that #threads can not only get your posts, even if you blocked them (via different servers that didn't and that store your posts cus people there may follow you or interact with you), they can also monetize those posts by showing ads next to them. Thus making money off of you. Put that together with all the genocidal and fascist and other harmful activity. It makes me think that the #enshittification of the #fedi has begun. The cycles seem to move faster and faster. I love it here and I've had many elightening convos and beautiful connections. Today I read that 41% of servers have blocked threads. Maybe there is still hope.
Esp. the neurodivergent community on here is the best I've ever experienced. @actuallyautistic
For context - I’m working on getting an emulated Everquest server up and running, but hitting dead ends (probably due to my newness to Linux in general) and seeking some guidance from the community on what I’ve tried and best path forward....
@dangillmor@paul I’m looking through the list and I’m seeing some more vulnerable communities moving away from Threads.
History tells us that those communities usually know what’s bad for us all, way before us who are less vulnerable become aware of a threat.
I also see what they are doing as setting boundaries to protect themselves, not setting rules for others*.
I am personally troubled where the boundary (I don’t want Threads to interact with me) also extends to servers that didn’t defederate (I don’t want you to interact with Threads).
For me, the boundary then becomes a rule, or perhaps even a purity test. And no matter my feelings, even then it is still not up to me.
*) If the difference between rules and boundaries is unfamiliar, that could be a sign you are not commonly in a vulnerable position.
Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all...
As the other reply said, Fedora and RHEL harbor the same problem as Ubuntu in terms of corporate backing.
They’re all as stable at it gets when it comes to linux distros; all those “server distributions”.
I guess people recommend debian because that’s what they know. It’s got the biggest community, so the most support.
Nothing against Rocky, but i wont recommend it if i’ve never used it.
So others have already talked about how great Star Trek is. I agree with them, but I think that literally everyone has missed the point of your question:
It's its own lemmy instance. It was spawned from the migration away from reddit, and it's stayed alive since. So combine an active former-reddit community with lemmy and a good reason to all rally around, and finally the final ingredient of federation, and the Star Trek related rooms will always be on every server, and they'll always be populated.
Hey, folks! As the holiday season approaches, and time off work is granted unto some of us, I thought it’d be a good time to post a quick and informal “state of the instance” report....
On version 0.19 you can block instances so that you don’t see any posts from that instance, instead of having to block communities one by one, you still see comments from users of that instance in other posts so it isn’t completely blocking the instance.
I don’t have plans to block any. I’ve already blocked the active communities in some of the instances I might consider blocking in whole to the point I never see posts from those instances anyway as well as any individual problem user I run across. I don’t really see a reason to block an entire server because even the worst places have some good people, just like all the best places still have some shitty people. Unless the instance itself was dedicated to CP or something.
As I watch The Internet look like it’s starting to adopt a new phase (let’s call it federation writ large), I’m watching for signs of both success and struggle. I have some strong opinions of features and functionality lacking in the current suite of UIs that might help adoption, but thing I’ve been thinking about more...
I completely agree and I think that’s the other most important factor. A decent UI could make up for a lot of the server side or even theoretical problems - like a filter that says don’t return community search results with fewer than 10 users.
I really with I was allowed to write apps. Whoever pulls off the lemmy version of alien blue is going to buy a new house.
It’s been quite a week for news in the fediverse, with the news that Threads has started their process of incrementally adding federation to Threads taking most of the attention. But lots of other great stuff happened in the fediverse as well:
Threads
Threads has started their implementation process of federation and adding ActivityPub to Threads. The first careful step is that a few Threads profiles are now visible in the fediverse, and that posts made by them can be viewed from fediverse servers. For now only the accounts for the profiles of Threads head Adam Mosseri and 2 Threads engineers are visible. Replies to their post made by a fediverse account does not federate back yet. Mosseri says that the process of adding federation will be done gradually in steps, and that he expects that this process will take most of the year. In another post, Mosseri also notes that federation will likely be opt-in for Threads accounts. This is in contrast with most fediverse software, which federates with all other fediverse servers by default, and federation is opt-out (blocking).
PeerTube
Framasoft announced their plans for PeerTube for the next year, in an extensive blog. I also hosted a livestreamed AMA with Framasoft for the community to ask all their questions about PeerTube, and it turned out amazing, with lots of great information. The entire AMA can be rewatched here. I’ll do a larger writeup on all the PeerTube news next week, but for now already the highlights: PeerTube is doubling their dev team, creating a mobile app, and will work on better moderation tools, and a review and redesign of the user interface. Stay tuned!
In other news
Lemmy has released their latest big update, v0.19. In this blog post they go over all the changes they’ve made. Two major new features are improved post ranking and instance blocking for individual accounts. With the new feed sorting of scaled sort, the community size where the post is made gets taken into account. This allows for smaller communities to have better visibility, and should increase their reach. People can now block entire instances as well, which should provide a significant increase in the ability for people to curate their digital spaces.
Discourse has been working on joining the fediverse for a while, and their latest update shows how far along they are. A Discourse category can now follow any actor in the fediverse. Check out their video to show this in practice, with federation between both different Discourses as well as Mastodon. This is a major step in expanding the fediverse, and worth keeping your eyes on.
The links
FediForum, the online unconference about the fediverse, has opened registrations for the third edition, on March 19-20, 2024. More information and registration on the website.
Mozilla.social, the fediverse server by Mozilla, is slowly opening up the server, and have added the first group of people from the waitlist.
Mastodon is experimenting with a new recommendation algorithm for finding interesting accounts to follow. The experiment is only available on the mastodon.online server.
Event Federation is a project that aims to federate WordPress events with the rest of the fediverse, and make it interoperable with programs like Mobilizon and Gancio. They just showed a sneak peak on the interoperability between WordPress Events and Mobilizon.
Bonfire has released documentation on their framework, that further explains how it is both a social network as well as a toolkit for communities to (re)design their digital spaces.
IFTAS has announced a sandbox server intended for moderators to practice moderation in a safe environment.
Owncast has started their own monthly newsletter, the first edition is available here.
Other articles
I wrote other articles as well this week, check it out!
I would argue that maybe news is a reasonable analogy. By living in a certain community you will mostly consume local news. However that does not stop you from checking other towns’ newspapers. This is why I think the default client and web interface should have a federated tab so as to make it every obvious how easy it is to interact with other servers.
There's a common false dichotomy about #Threads: cut them off, or leave it to user choice.I can't speak to other software, but Mastodon offers a third option: limiting Threads. This can be done for all users of a server....
Ah, I misunderstood what you were saying at first. You’re right, it’s not everything on the instance that gets sent, only those things that federated instances need.
But as a user, unless I run my own instance, I don’t get to decide when my posts or edits get sent out to any federated servers. That’s what I was referring to. All of that stuff gets sent out “like a firehose.”
And over time, as more people on Threads interact with certain ActivityPub instances, the range of communities Threads will be sent updates for might as well be the entire instance. If I block them, that’s just a visual block. My stuff will still be sent to them, and depending on how they set up their federation, my content might be available on “threads.net” as well.
That’s why I’m so proud of the community I made on my server. I’ve heard from a lot of people that they just sorta… immediately felt included despite there being almost 200 people. I’ve also had people tell me that they don’t really feel like I’m some figure they need to watch out for, unlike a lot of server owners. It’s a nice thing to hear
Hey hcommons.social and the #fediverse: we've made the decision not to federate with #Meta and #Threads. We do not feel that we can adequately protect members of our community from potential attacks from anti-LGBTQ+, anti-Black, anti-academic, or other extremists who can freely create accounts and sow hatred on Threads unless we block the server. We do not want to allow any kinds of connections that would make our most at-risk users less safe.
We understand that this may disappoint some of you, and that you may wish to seek another instance that will allow you to communicate more freely with your friends on that network. Please read more about our reasoning on our team blog: https://team.hcommons.org/2023/12/15/threads/
One way I can think of is by being such a big player that they dominate and can thereby exert their will. For example, lemmy.world is the largest lemmy instance and we’ve seen a few communities on other instances dry up in favour of the ones on the big server. Now imagine that server is a hundred times bigger than the next largest and the people in charge have an active financial interest in moving people to their platform - if they play it carefully (and I’m sure they’ll be employing people to think about how to do this) they can shift the existing content into a place they can control it.
The funny part is that blocking the instance makes it more likely that people migrate to threads. We’ve seen that when lemmy instances defederate from the larger problem servers, people will jump ship to be back in those larger communities.
I think the cat’s out of the bag. There’s no stopping it at this point. And even if ever person who runs a Mastodon server got together to push back, defederated with Threads and BlueSky, and tried to stay away, it wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar for these big players.
To be honest, I’m not sold on federation in general for social media. I think it’s an answer to the wrong question. We’re asking “how can we make social media better?” and not “why do we need social media at all?”
Federation has shown itself to be extremely problematic. You have people coming and going from other instances that you don’t control and can’t enforce in any way other than to just block the instance. If I have e.g. a Mastodon instance based around a safe, positive space for the queer community, and others have instances based around bigotry, white supremacy, transphobia, etc. (which they do), then I either allow bigots to come and go, or I have to spend an inordinate amount of extra time on moderation. Same goes for Lemmy/kbin/etc.
People are also continuing to think with a limited frame of reference. The idea of federation is still “how can I get all my ‘content’ in one place?” because we’ve been dominated by these monolithic walled gardens for the last decade. Sure it might be annoying to have to have multiple logins for difference services, but I’d rather that over having a single place where Nazis can come and go as they please with few to no tools to stop them.
With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...
I’m not worried about dependency on content from threads. I’m primarily concerned with facebook’s data harvesting. I have a Facebook account, but I only touch it when I have to. All other aspects of my social life are pretty much divorced from Facebook. I fear that with federating, my activity will populate on their servers and they will feel completely entitled to all of it to train their AI and create advertising profiles without any consent. All of our activity will be free use for their profit.
I’d actually feel better if the process of federating required an EULA or something where the instance seeking federation must deny any right to use community content without explicit, signed permission from individual users.
db0 , i really like your server tbh but my monyet.cc is serving me currently well the fact that you have a photon , tensorrect etc as alternate frontends is kinda cool as well :p thanks man , we as a community appreciate your instance and its c/piracy -fellow pirate
Getting a Server Running - SteamOS - Best Path Forward?
For context - I’m working on getting an emulated Everquest server up and running, but hitting dead ends (probably due to my newness to Linux in general) and seeking some guidance from the community on what I’ve tried and best path forward....
Known Issues w/ Lemmy 0.19.0 - Will upgrade to 0.19.1 when released
Hi folks!...
Is Ubuntu deserving the hate? (lemmy.ml)
Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all...
Dear Lemmy, **why** Star Trek??
Every single large server in this federation has at least one Star Trek community. There is even an entire server dedicated to Star Trek....
State of the instance: you may need to re-enable two-factor
Hey, folks! As the holiday season approaches, and time off work is granted unto some of us, I thought it’d be a good time to post a quick and informal “state of the instance” report....
What instances are you going to block?
On version 0.19 you can block instances so that you don’t see any posts from that instance, instead of having to block communities one by one, you still see comments from users of that instance in other posts so it isn’t completely blocking the instance.
[Long post] Do more or fewer communities lead to increased engagement?
As I watch The Internet look like it’s starting to adopt a new phase (let’s call it federation writ large), I’m watching for signs of both success and struggle. I have some strong opinions of features and functionality lacking in the current suite of UIs that might help adoption, but thing I’ve been thinking about more...
Your 2023 Owl of the Year Finalists! (files.catbox.moe)
Both were tough battles to the finish yesterday, but your winners were clear:...
A new Type of Mastodon Signup that gives people a sense of Agency (fungiverse.wordpress.com)
cross-posted from: feddit.de/post/6792877...
Lemmy v0.19.0 Release - Instance blocking, Scaled sort, and Federation Queue (join-lemmy.org)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/9347983...
The SSC subreddit ponders the difference between Bayesianism and plain old bias (old.reddit.com)
Erik Moeller on Mastodon: There's a common false dichotomy about Threads [...] (nerdica.net) en-gb
There's a common false dichotomy about #Threads: cut them off, or leave it to user choice.I can't speak to other software, but Mastodon offers a third option: limiting Threads. This can be done for all users of a server....
rule (beehaw.org)
Lemmy v0.19.0 Release - Instance blocking, Scaled sort, and Federation Queue (join-lemmy.org)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/9347983...
Lemmy v0.19.0 Release - Instance blocking, Scaled sort, and Federation Queue (join-lemmy.org)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/9347983...
Threads Has Begun Federating Via ActivityPub (daringfireball.net)
Adam Mosseri:...
A case for preemptively defederating with Threads (kbin.social)
With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...
what is your favorite lemmy instance?
ngl I may prefer lemm.ee, just saying