The free fediverses should emphasize networked communities ( privacy.thenexus.today )

Kierunkowy74 , 4 months ago

Meta's fediverses probably also won't be able to compete with Threads on this. Threads plan to make federation opt-in is the right thing to do from a privacy and safety perspective, but also means that people in Meta's fediverses won't be able to communiate with most of the people on Threads. And Meta has the option of adding communication between Threads and the billions of people on other networks like Instagram (which already shares the same infrastructure), Facebook, and WhatsApp. Longer-term, it seems to me that this is likely to be a huge challenge for Meta's fediverses, but fediverse influencers supporting federating with Meta have various arguments why it doesn't matter.

Is it really Meta's fediverses, when communication between them and their alleged owner is fairly little and actively gatekept by their alleged owner?

thenexusofprivacy OP , 4 months ago

Here’s the definition I gave for term in the first article i the series:

“Meta’s fediverses”, federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta’s behalf.

0x1C3B00DA , 4 months ago

no just like federating with mastodon.social doesn't make your instance a part of the Gargron fediverse. Meta can't control non-Meta instances that federate with them

pipows , 4 months ago

Are there cross instances communities in Lemmy? How does that work?

thenexusofprivacy OP , 4 months ago

Yes, I’d say Lemmy communities are cross-instance communities - people can join communities on a different instance than their account.

pipows , 4 months ago

Oh, I understand. That’s not what I was thinking tho, I misinterpreted the “cross-instances” thing, I thought it meant supercommuties taht includes communities from various instaces

skullgiver , 4 months ago

Lemmy communities work a bit weird when (de)federation gets involved.

By default, any community any server member is subscribed to gets mirrored to your home server. If your home server defederates/gets defederated, that local copy is still available. Local users can still post content, post comments, and have all kinds of interactions, the rest of the Fediverse just doesn’t know about it. It’s a bit like a “fork” in git/blockchain tech.

I don’t think you can subscribe to the local copy of a different server (although perhaps technically you could implement that relatively easily, I think?) but in a way any remote community you follow is “cross instance”.

Lemmy doesn’t implement supercommunities like Reddit does with subreddits (you can’t merge the “technology” communities of different servers under a single name), though that feature has been requested a bunch of times. That would be a solution where rather than following a bunch of different communities on different servers, you could merge a bunch of remote communities together under one single supercommunity that everybody can then follow, allowing for an intricate network of local communities that’s harder to break up (until, of course, said supercommunity starts removing subcommunities for whatever reason).

skullgiver , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 4 months ago

If I’m not free to join the Fediverse from the server of my choice, whether that’s mastodon.social or threads.net, is the Fediverse truly free?

Joining the fediverse is just a matter of using a platform that implements ActivityPub (the protocol that lets servers communicate with each other. If Threads implements ActivityPub, it's part of the fediverse, and the people on Threads can interact without any instance that chooses to federate.

However, instances don't have to federate with Threads. That's part of the freedom of the fediverse. If an instance admin decides that they don't want to deal with an influx of hate, don't want most of the content their uses see to be from Meta, or just don't want to federate with a for-profit company that has an awful track record, they should be able to defederate. If a user of that instance really wants to see Threads content, they should be able to move to an instance that lets them, but defederation doesn't make the fediverse or ActivityPub less free.

skullgiver , 4 months ago

Of course, admins are free to federate, defederate, and ban as they like.

I just think tying definitions like “free” to specific instances is silly. There is no inherent freedom in blocking specific instances. Different terms like “non-commercial” or “tracking-free” would be much better descriptions of these corpo-defederating instances than “the free Fediverse”.