About federation with Threads: how is it possible that lemmy.world is federated?
About federation with Threads: how is it possible that lemmy.world is federated?
Hi everyone, I’m one of the administrators of the Lemmy feddit.it instance - my nick is @poliverso@poliverso@feddit.it
Together with our fellow administrators, based on some impact assessments, we have decided not to operate any preventative block against Threads, but I am not aware that we are still federated. I noticed that your instance is federated to Threads instead, but I don’t understand how this was possible. The strange thing is that, from your instance, it is still not possible to view those dozen Threads accounts that are currently “federable”. So I wanted to ask you: is there a way to force federation?
Thanks in advance for your feedback, sorry for the inconvenience and best wishes for a happy holiday!
I honestly don’t want to be federated with Threads or any social media giant. I really enjoy the organic discussion and lack of advertisements in fediverse compared to a strong amount of paint by numbers discourse/ads ads ads on the standard social media
I agree. Thats why threads is blocked on my instance. I can only encourage peeps who really like lemmy to make their own private instances (maybe for a handful close friends) and add resilience and diversity to the fediverse. There even is some kind of easy deployment script now afaik.
It is odd that threads.net appears on our instances page, while the same is not true for other Lemmy instances which have not blocked Threads. Lemmy.world is federated with Threads by default simply because it is not on our instance block list. I do not believe our instance has done anything special to force a link with Threads. I mentioned it in our admin chat and will update this post if I learn anything.
However, even with threads.net listed on our instances page, Threads does not seem to work with Lemmy. I am able to search and view Mastodon user profiles from lemmy.world, but it does not work for any of the Threads test profiles.
Edit: The lemmy.world database has no records for a
personon threads.net. Our best guess is that a Threads user tried to interact with lemmy.world. Perhaps the process got far enough for our instance to recognize threads.net and add it to our instances list, but not far enough to create a record of the user in our DB.Now I understand: I thought that federating Threads was a deliberate choice, but it was probably an incidental phenomenon simply due to the large numbers managed by your instance.
Probably one of the ten Instagram executives who have a federated profile has tried to search for one of your contents. Or he found the message of a followed user who participated in one of your threads in his Timeline. Or they are simply experimenting with your instance...😁
I said the wrong thing here. Excuse me
In any case, there is at least one other Lemmy instance, probably for the same reason: it is an instance that handles quite large numbers anyway:~~https://sh.itjust.works/instances~~EDIT: no it is not true: https://lemmy.world/comment/7949266
sh.itjust.works explicitly blocks Threads. They held a vote among the local users: https://sh.itjust.works/post/11308397
Threads isnt really federated yet. They have enabled an opt in federation for some accounts on threads like the CEOs account but its not like mastodon etc that have instances that are federated
I'm not a fan of this either.
I understand your choices well. We have made an internal evaluation on the opportunity to federate Threads with our instances: with the mastodon poliversity.it instance we decided to silence Threads; with the Friendica poliverso.org instance we used the newly introduced functionality to obfuscate all the personal data of our users towards Threads; with the Lemmy feddit.it instance, however, we decided to leave the federation to try to allow Italian Threads users (feddit.it is an Italian-speaking instance) to use activitypub groups and discover the "free Fediverse"
Great example of how there isn't any one right answer here, it's different for different instances. Can I quote this in the "What will instances do? Opinions differ!" section of https://privacy.thenexus.today/should-the-fediverse-welcome-surveillance-capitalism ?
I'll also try to mention admins @jelloeater85@lemmy.world @Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world @Rooki@lemmy.world and @kersploosh@lemmy.world
I thought the point of federation is that you cannot force an instance to federate with any other activity pub app or service? I'm very happy to be wrong.
In reality, any user can force federation by simply searching for the handle of a user or content of the fedeverse from the search box of their instance. This method always works unless the instance has been previously defederated.
The problem is that from feddit.it I can't "find" the contents of Threads (and not even from lemmy.world), even when they are those of the ten Instagram executives visible from mastodon.social and from any other instance that has not defederated Threads
In reality, any user can force federation by simply searching for the handle of a user or content of the fedeverse from the search box of their instance. This method always works unless the instance has been previously federated.
That's not quite true. That won't bypass explicit defederation at the instance level, and authorised fetch can stop it from working at the individual block level too.
It looks like Twitter users are explicitly paying to access the Fediverse using servers like @bird.makup.
God likes voluntary suffering