Hi everyone, I’m one of the administrators of the Lemmy feddit.it instance - my nick is @poliverso@[email protected]

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!

  • SuperSynthia@lemmy.worldEnglish
    614·
    9 months ago

    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

    • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.comEnglish
      101·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        Yep but I don’t really think small instances work well just yet.

        I have a powerful PC (enough RAM, cores, nvme etc on a 1Gb line, 700Mb up) and it’s incredibly slow most of the time, because I guess, there are not many users forcing the federation.

        I’m working on some band-aid scripts to half-fix that until Lemmy catches up, but just so you know it’s not perfect for small communities yet it seems.

        • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.comEnglish
          6·
          9 months ago

          We‘re having very opposite experiences then. Setting up a private instance wasn‘t crazy easy or anything but if it works, it mostly works well. Also, lemmy doesnt need a fast pc. A thread or two and half a gig of ram should suffice. The reason for it being slow could be either bad connection, too much downtime (not running 24/7), configuration error or old version (prior to 0.19.3 there were federation errors).

          So I‘m pretty sure setting up your own has no downsides in terms of performance, absolutely not related to pc performance in any way. The only thing is knowledge required since both setting up and running can come with curveballs.

          What problems are you experiencing exactly? Maybe I can help.

          • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
            31·
            9 months ago

            Thanks for the feedback!

            I had some massive problems with the first 0.19, which eventually was fixed but 0.19.3 just was so slow (and only had “minor fixes” IIRC) so after the painful time of the broken federation I reverted to 0.19.2 just because it “worked”. Maybe I should try the 0.19.3 again.

            I do have a beefy PC with a good connection and it runs 24/24 so I’ll definitely try out the latest version (again).

            Cheers

                • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.comEnglish
                  2·
                  9 months ago

                  Awesome! Love to hear it. I‘m still having months old posts pop up from the time I havent had 0.19.3 so maybe you will see that too but otherwise it should be working. Feel free to update further down the line.

      • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        I think it might happen just from doing a search for the content using the right terms / string?

        • sab@kbin.social
          16·
          9 months ago

          You cannot view microblog posts from Lemmy, so the only way you’ll see anything from Threads is if a user from there responds to content posted to Lemmy or similar sites. Possibly also if they choose to tag a community in their post, but that seems unlikely for anything else than testing purposes.

          Same as Mastodon users, really.

        • Zak@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          9 months ago

          A quick look through the source code suggests that any attempt to interact with or by another instance creates a database entry for it, which makes it show up at /instances. Someone could have tried to view a threads account from lemmy.world, or someone at Threads may have tried to view a lemmy.world post, user, or community from within Threads for testing.

          • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
            51·
            9 months ago

            fwiw, it does not appear to be triggerable from within lemmy at this time.

            I’ve just tried this on another instance and lemmy complains

            The webfinger object did not contain any link to an activitypub item

            I suspect this currently can only be triggered from threads.

  • kersploosh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    9 months ago

    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 person on 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.

  • Nix@merv.newsEnglish
    16·
    9 months ago

    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

  • aodhsishaj@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • InformaPirata@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      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

      • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        12·
        9 months ago

        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.

  • mrshy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    It looks like Twitter users are explicitly paying to access the Fediverse using servers like @bird.makup.