this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
14 points (100.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
29351 readers
646 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Posts must be original/unique
- Be good to others - no bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So many knee-jerk reactions.
This is an open protocol with complete freedom to create apps and scripts. If this becomes an issue users could block certain interactions in a granular manner, for example block replies from certain instances.
XMPP being thrown around as an example makes me think people who do it weren't there to witness it. XMPP by itself wasn't really used by many but there were also many more popular messaging platforms at the time. XMPP wasn't killed because it wasn't ever alive other than short golden era when it was mostly a way to open itself to third party clients (Gaim, Trillian, Adium etc) which was very nice.
Next year EU is going to make all tech giants open in this way again. Mastodon can EEE Threads too by being a better implementation. It has no commercial pressure and Activity Pub and formatting tweets is not as complex as a web browser engine or a word processor document format which are way better examples of successful EEE.
If you defederate you'll end up exactly where XMPP is.
I agree with the sentiment, I'm not a fan of preemptively blocking meta on instance level, especially when everyone was touting about how the fediverse is corporation resistant and by design it is resilient because of it's horizontal nature, but at the first sign of threat they resort to the nuclear option.
Having said that, Lemmy specifically lacks tools on the user level, especially blocking instances. If a user doesn't want to associate at all that is understandable (privacy concerns, not wanting to interact with hate groups, etc) but right now they can only block communities and users individually, which would make it impossible to block meta.
Lastly, I feel there are avenues that haven't been properly explored, like forcing them to open source if they want to federate. (On the grounds of privacy concerns and security) In practice that would be the same as blocking them, but it would laid out a good foundation for new companies that want to enter the space without having to discriminate on a case by case basis.
Problem is that blocking is the nuclear option and everyone blovking before something comes out, which no one knows the danger yet like a hate speach platform would entail, goes against the spirit of the fediverse.
My reason for preemptively blocking Threads is much simpler - Lemmy exposes a TON of data from all instances. I simply don't want to feed the data hog any more than absolutely necessary.
But a counter is that much of that information is already public and can be scraped, they aren't gaining much on outside meta users that they aren't already able to do.
Best advice at the end of the day is that for social media, unless advertised on privacy, never post anything you dont want to be public. And for cases like lemmy, expect even metadata to be available for anyone interested.
I understand the wish to not interact with meta, even if its for privacy concerns.
But Im a firm believer that it is the user first who needs to make that decision, not the instance. But as I said, Lemmy being the only one of the big fedi platforms right now that doesnt have a feature for instance/domain blocking user level kinds of screws this up.
There is no technical way for the user to make this decision as data gets federated across instance databases, not users' browsers. I do run my own, which is what enables me to make this decision, and anyone agreeing with it is welcome to come along.
When you say that there is no technical way, you sre referring to users not being able to block instances right?
If it's that I don't think it is that difficult to implement, Mastodon already allows for that. And also the app "connect for lemmy" in its last update has given the option to block instances user level, I don't really know yet if it blocks all users from that indtance from appearing or only communities as I haven't tested it yet.
Regardless to say, if we can get the appropriate tools this definitely could be a decision for users to take, if we make it so that they can completely block any and all content coming from a big instance.
A user blockin visibility of content is very different from that content not being federated.