Is the fediverse a technology or an ideology? The... fundamentalism I am seeing around the issue of Threads is a little disturbing. It feels kinda culty.
You are taking this massive “if” and building a whole policy of preemptive panic around it:
I don't see how it's a "massive 'if'." If it was just some fringe possibility, I wouldn't be so concerned, but the thing is that I don't see any realistic scenario where we don't become dependent on Meta for microblog activity. If 99% of microblogs come from Threads, that's exactly what's happening. To give an example that's more relevant to the thread aggregation side of Kbin, if Reddit were to federate and we didn't defederate, Reddit would make up 99% of the thread activity we see, we'd get used to that, and we'd be completely dependent on them to maintain that. With how desperate people seem to be for a quick boost in activity that they'll just take whatever Mark Zuckerberg offers as if there are no strings attached, I don't see how we just end up fine if Threads is to ever leave in the future. If Threads becomes most of what we see, we'll be dependent on them, and if Threads then leaves (which they have incentive to do), much of who we have right now on these platforms will join Threads after getting used to the activity, and getting new users will be much more difficult.
And if we don’t and we defederate, we’ve just cut off potentially interesting conversations with interesting people based on ideology.
That's definitely true. Again, What Meta is essentially offering is free activity on a silver platter. What's completely nonsensical is to act like there aren't any strings attached when there are obviously strings attached. Meta is trying to maximize profit. Anyone who thinks that Zuckerberg suddenly cares about an open fediverse even though its values (people being on multiple instances, everything being transparent, no one person or group having too much control, etc.) go directly against his goal is either delusional or very misinformed about what these for-profit tech companies do. It strongly benefits him to take users from Mastodon, Firefish, Misskey, Kbin, etc., and allowing ourselves to depend on him for fediverse activity puts him in a prime position to do it.
What's completely nonsensical is to act like there aren't any strings attached when there are obviously strings attached.
Let's look at the strings
Meta is trying to maximize profit. Anyone who thinks that Zuckerberg suddenly cares about an open fediverse even though its values (people being on multiple instances, everything being transparent, no one person or group having too much control, etc.) go directly against his goal is either delusional or very misinformed about what these for-profit tech companies do.
That's all true. But that's not really a string - it's just a fact of any for-profit organisation that sets up an instance
It strongly benefits him to take users from Mastodon, Firefish, Misskey, Kbin, etc., and allowing ourselves to depend on him for fediverse activity puts him in a prime position to do it.
But he can do that anyway. And in fact people who who want to interact with the 140million ish Threads users currently have one option - join Threads. With federation I can communicate with Threads users without joining Threads. That needs to be factored in.
That's all true. But that's not really a string - it's just a fact of any for-profit organisation that sets up an instance
Correct, and it's a fact that's horrendously bad for an organization that's going to harbor a vast majority of the content on the fediverse.
But he can do that anyway. And in fact people who who want to interact with the 140million ish Threads users currently have one option - join Threads. With federation I can communicate with Threads users without joining Threads. That needs to be factored in.
The people who are at currently at this point have already gone to Threads. The main issue I see is everyone getting used to the 50x boost in activity that Threads provides and then Meta removing that by defederating, pulling people to Threads when they wouldn't have gone there otherwise. Allowing ourselves to become dependent on Meta lets them get users they wouldn't have before and kill the growth prospects of platforms like Mastodon, both of which they have incentive to do.
You say: The people who are at currently at this point have already gone to Threads. Then you say that if traffic from Threads is subsequently withdrawn, all the people who haven't already gone to Threads will... go to Threads.
You are basing it on the idea that Threads federating is a temporary move designed to advertise Threads. It's a theory. But seems unlikely. If Threads goes away again, I suspect that the current Fediverse userbase will, by and large still be here.
You say: The people who are at currently at this point have already gone to Threads. Then you say that if traffic from Threads is subsequently withdrawn, all the people who haven't already gone to Threads will... go to Threads.
Let me clarify. When I say, "The people who are currently at this point…," I mean the people who right now feel that they need to interact Threads. If they do, they're probably there. My issue is that if people are dependent on Threads for the vast majority of microblog activity, more people will feel that they need to keep that interaction with Threads. I'm not seeing how this is some far fetched theory more than it is straight up inevitable. If activity increases by 50x because 98% of the content is now coming from Threads and most of whom people are following are on Threads, more people will feel the need to stay connected. I don't see how it could be otherwise. This means that if an instance wanted to defederate from Threads for any reason or if Threads defederated themselves (which they have tons of incentive to do later down the line), tons of people would leave.
To give you an example, imagine if kbin.social was to defederating from lemmy.world and lemmy.ml due to unhappiness with their moderation. Obviously, defederating from any instance is going to lose you some users, but those two instances harbor a massive portion — probably a large majority — of the content on the threadiverse. Tons of people would leave kbin.social for the simple reason that most all of the activity that they were used to would be gone otherwise.
Now, with Threads, there is some resistance in the fact that Meta is a massive for-profit corporation. Many people won't move to Threads on principle. However, this is countered by the extremely strong pull factor of the sheer percentage of activity Threads would harbor. If people get used to all of that activity based on Threads and are following mostly Threads accounts, tons of those people will leave an instance should that instance defederate later on or jump ship from the fediverse to Threads should Meta cease federation. And among those who don't leave, there will likely be a lot less motivation to post after such a drop in activity and interaction.
I don't see how dependency on Meta for the vast majority microblog content could possibly be a good idea. If Kbin were to implement a silencing feature like what Mastodon apparently has, where Threads content would be invisible outside of Threads users that you've followed, I think that'd be fine. That way, people could intearct with a few Threads accounts they're especially interested in as opposed to the public microblog feeds being 99% Threads and us being dependent on Threads to maintain the activity of those feeds. But just letting them flood our microblogs seems like an extremely dangerous idea that's wholly unnecessary, and I haven't been convinced otherwise.
And in fact people who who want to interact with the 140million ish Threads users currently have one option - join Threads. With federation I can communicate with Threads users without joining Threads.
What if the defederation happens in the other direction? Defederating an instance is a lot like banning a user, and I'm not sure if there are any mainstream social media sites that I haven't heard abuse their ban system. If other instances start becoming more popular because people want to use them to talk to Threads, that gives Threads a lot of power over which of those instances are allowed to thrive. In the worst case scenario, it could easily kill an instance if too many of their users were there for Threads and Threads decides to cut them off.
A fediverse that is popular because it can talk to a centralized app doesn't sound like a particularly healthy fediverse to me.
I don't personally have any issues with the website on mobile, I wonder if it could be browser related? I'm also not expecting perfection from something that hasn't been around very long, and never was on reddit so have nothing to compare it to.
I think you have valid points about "dealing" and "learning" and for some, that will be a turnoff. For me, it is an adventure 🙂
… why? They just seem like a Lemmy instance for sports. Who are these people you have issue with? What are they posting that's so bad? Why do these few people justify what's essentially the nuclear bomb of instance moderation?
I have a similar problem, but with a different user than you. About once a week or so, this user will go through my comment history and just downvote everything. I don't even know what his issue is, because he constantly deletes his own comments and has zero visible comments on his profile anymore, so I have no clue if I've somehow angered him or if he's just a random troll. Unfortunately, blocking him doesn't have any impact on this.
I agree, though. There should definitely be better protections in place against this sort of bad behavior. While I'm not a huge fan of Reddit's implementation of user blocking, it does at least prevent this sort of trolling from occurring. It would be great if there could be a middle-ground between what we currently have and what Reddit has.
Moving your account is the same as redirecting your account, but it will also irreversibly force everyone to unfollow your current account and follow your new account, if their software supports the Move activity. Your posts will not be moved, due to technical limitations. There is also a 30 day cooldown period in which you cannot migrate again, so be very careful before using this option!
Depending on if k/m/bin receives a "Move" activity, it may be possible to update user blocklists based on the information in the "Move" activity. However, "Move" activity is generally only sent to existing followers. (I don't know all the details on that) Activities are generally sent to an instance to handle, not individual user accounts, though, so I suspect this might not be as big of a hurdle as it might seem.
Short answer: Maybe. Depends on how they "Moved". It wouldn't be simple to implement, however I don't see anything preventing it in this particular case. You should open an Issue for feature request for it. I recommend including the above piece from the Mastodon documentation, however in your issue.
This is a feature, not a bug. I'm not sure how you know they are the same user, but if they do the same thing that got them blocked before, you can block them again.
Their old account has a blurb providing the new account name. In my case I'm not dealing with a malicious user, just one whose content I don't want to see.
You know they are the same user because mastodon has a protocol for Migration. Basically, you announce on the old instance what your new handle is and confirm from the new instance that this is where you came from. Mastodon then migrates your followers (and blockers). So you can change instances transparent to others.
Of course, this migration is more work than simply creating a fresh account, so i doubt this helps against spammers, but it may help against annoying people.
I'm okay with someone not agreeing with me. I'm okay with someone downvoting me.
Someone downvoting everything I have and will ever make? Well, there's a magazine I'd love to get more folks in and this behavior could cripple it badly, since I get next-to-no votes in there from others so it's already difficult to get more eyes on it. But other than that I think I get more agreements so I wouldn't care that much.
Therefore I'm happy that there's an upvote and downvote (and a reputation) system.
Counterpoint: it makes it even more apparent when bigoted alt right trolls like AnotherAttorney post and we can see they're the ones upvoting and boosting their own terrible posts, and ridicule them til they quit or switch sock puppets
@billothekid2 this exchange raises another point. You and @snooggums downvoting each other here seem to be engaging in "downvote-to-disagree" with each other.
I don't see nearly as much of this on kbin as I do on, say, lemmy.world and I'm sure it's because of our more transparent voting system.
I'm personally not a fan because I think it's vaguely hostile and discourages open discussion.
Same, generally speaking when I'm writing a comment in order to disagree with someone I want that other person's comment to be more visible to other readers. That way they can read it, see my response, and realize how wrong the original comment was and how right I am. :) I save my downvotes for comments that are so wrong they're not worth a response.
I'll even sometimes downvote a comment, ponder for a moment, and then remove my downvote and write a response instead.
The way I see it, downvotes = "I wish this comment didn't exist" and doing it to punish someone for having a discussion with us is weird, since social media is all about discussions, and exchanging disagreeing points of view is interesting.
Fair enough. I tend to think downvotes are warranted when it's not adding anything to the conversation and/or are somewhat hostile. Not that it's worth anything at this point, but the downvote was because I literally just explained myself on the very post they were responding to. People are just putting words in my mouth at this point just because they want to disagree, and at some point it's easier to downvote that to repeat myself.
I am downvoting because complaining about downvotes while saying they don't matter is hypocritical and not a discussion made in good faith. Just wanted to see if they voted in response, showing their hypocrisy.
You see? That's literally not what I said. I seem to have struck a nerve with you here and I'm not sure why. But go ahead. Give me my downvote that I apparently care so much about.
canis_majoris said to stop caring and you replied with
I don't. That's why I called them imaginary internet points. Lol. My point was about the fact that you can see who downvotes you.
Yet, you noticed someone downvoting a bunch of your posts and took the time to contact them and ask for reason. Then you didn't like their response and made this post. Then when I downvoted it you downvoted my post. The only reason for you to do any of this is because you care about being downvoted. You react to it, yet say you don't care. That is what you said and did, and what I am responding to.
I hate being accused of lying, so I responded to you implying that I'm lying by claiming something other than what you said.
FWIW, I usually downvote if the person is a dick. Often I also disagree with them, but not always. If you are dragging the conversation down (in some way other than having an unpopular opinion) you get a downvote.
I don't think it's as simple as that. Downvotes do have some kind of meaning — when you give a downvote, you're doing it for some reason that you want to convey — and people are going to interpret downvotes accordingly. If downvotes didn't mean anything, then there'd be no point to them existing at all. What exactly a downvote means depends on the person giving it, but it's ideally (imo) used to express that a post is spam, hateful, or otherwise a bad contribution to the discussion. Obviously, people shouldn't take downvotes personally, but a post being downvoted does and should mean something.
Thus, what OP mentions in his post is a legitimate concern. Public votes allow people to more easily downvote spam someone who downvoted them, which is unequivocally a bad thing that we'd prefer not to have. However, whether we should make votes private is a matter of whether the downsides outweigh the upsides, and they don't.
Yeah but it’s a non-issue, because they’re describing a behavior that cannot be prohibited regardless of if you can see who did it or not. It’s not like there’s a hard archive timer on votes disallowing comments to be interacted with; people can go down the whole history of any of our accounts and downvote all of it.
It’s literally a non-issue, this guy is freaking out because he can just see who did it, like it makes a difference. It’s the ostrich syndrome, if you bury your head in the sand (can’t verify) then it matters less.
Who's freaking out my dude? My point was this wouldn't have happened if THEY didn't know who I was. You and others make some good points about some how this happens regardless, and how there are upsides to seeing who downvotes you. I honestly wasn't aware this was a common thing until now. It's why I asked if this has happened to anyone else. Chalk it up to me being a bit naive.
kbinMeta
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.