Damn, that’s sad. Thank you for the info.

Worst hypothesis they just need to mess around a bit. For example I don’t think that queerasfu.ck would be registered.

They could get a .ck domain instead and move to queer.as.fu.ck, no?

Another important detail is that Digg v4 pissed off most of the userbase, so the impact was pretty much immediate. Reddit APIcalypse pissed off only power users instead; the impact will only come off later (sadly likely past IPO).

Let’s go simpler: what if your instance was allowed to copy the fed/defed lists from other instances, and use them (alongside simple Boolean logic plus if/then statements) to automatically decide who you’re going to federate/defederate with? That would enable caracoles and fedifams for admins who so desire, but also enable other organically grown relations.

For example. Let’s say that you just joined the federation. And there are three instances that you somewhat trust:

• Alice - it defederates only really problematic instances.
• Bob and Charlie - both are a bit prone to defederate other instances on a whim, but when both defed the same instance it’s usually problematic.

Then you could set up your defederation rules like this:

• if Alice defed it, then defed it too.
• else, if (Bob defed it) and (Charlie defed it), then defed it too.
• else, federate with it.

Of course, that would require distinguishing between manual and automatic fed/defed. You’d be able to use the manual fed/defed from other instances to create your automatic rules, to avoid deadlocks like “Alice is blocking it because Bob is blocking it, and Bob is blocking it because Alice is doing it”.

Oh “great”, more crap between Ctrl and Alt.

[Grumpy grandpa] In my times, the space row only had five keys! And we did more than those youngsters do with eight, now nine keys!

Got someone in my family with diabetes type I, and we’ve been hearing about the “magical” solution coming “soon” since she was diagnosed with it, in her childhood, around 30 years ago.

As such I’ll keep what I see as a healthy amount of scepticism towards this piece of news.

You’re welcome.

I think that people being jerks take for granted how confusing this might be, if you’re new; we (people in general) tend to take vocab that we already know for granted, as well as solutions for small problems. …except that it doesn’t work when you’re starting out, and we all need to start out somewhere, right.

You have two options: install curl (check @[email protected]’s comment) or do it manually. Installing curl is the easiest.

If you want to do it the hard way (without the terminal), here’s how:

1. Download the file https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc from your web browser.
2. Open your file browser as administrator. There’s probably some link for that in the Menu.
3. Move the file that you just downloaded to the directory /usr/share/keyrings/

It’s less complicated than it looks like. The text is just a poorly written mess, full of options (Fedora vs. Ubuntu, repo vs. no repo, stable vs. beta), and they’re explaining how to do this through the terminal alone because the interface that you have might be different from what they expect. And because copy-pasting commands is faster.

Can’t I just download a file and install it? I’m on Ubuntu.

Yes, you can! In fact, the instructions include this option; it’s under “Installing the app without the Mullvad repository”. It’s a bad idea though; then you don’t get automatic updates.

A better way to do this is to tell your system “I want software from this repository”, so each time that they make a new version of the program, yours get updated.

but I have no idea what I’m doing here.

I’ll copy-paste their commands to do so, and explain what each does.

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mullvad-vpn

The first command boils down to “download this keyring from the internet”. The keyring is a necessary file to know if you’re actually getting your software from Mullvad instead of PoopySoxHaxxor69. If you wanted, you could do it manually, and then move to the /usr/share/keyrings directory, but… it’s more work, come on.

The second command tells your system that you want software from repository.mullvad.net. I don’t use Ubuntu but there’s probably some GUI to do it for you.

The third command boils down to “hey, Ubuntu, update the list of packages for me”.

The fourth one installs the software.

says the web megacommunity is on a roll.

“Outside, pretty viola; inside, rotten wood.”

I don’t interact with Reddit any more so it’s plain as day for me to see, when I do visit it, that the place changed considerably from the APIcalypse to now. It’s the decadence from the last ~5 years, except on steroids; brain drained, bots going rogue, users screeching at each other based on assumptions and mods doing nothing to handle it. Those trashy and large subreddits are fairly active, but it seems to me that activity for smaller subs went considerably down.

As cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman explained to The New York Times’ Mike Isaac, the company was concerned by how AI giants such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft were mining the wealth of knowledge in its discussion threads to train chatbots, thereby creating new competition for Reddit while it footed the bill.

And based on how he handled the third party apps, he’s likely omitting critical concerns.

And also, you know…

• [User] I made something!
• [Reddit Inc.] You made something? [snatches it] It’s mine. My precioooous!

“Reddit is an open platform, and we love that,” he told me. “

Holy shit, Greedy Pigboy’s ability to lie with a straight face never ceases to amaze me. It’s almost like he’s telling the interviewer “you’re gullible trash, aren’t you? Yes, you’re stupid, so are the things reading your article. I’m going to smear some bullshit on your snouts and you’re going to swallow it, like the filthy animals lacking human-like reasoning that you are.”

Sorry folks here for the tone. I can’t be bothered to read it further.

Potentially hot take: perhaps it’s time to punish Reddit Inc. and Greedy Pigboy, isn’t it?

I will warn you, it does have a silly name, but that was the name that was decided upon.

Damn, I was almost going to suggest some stuff. (chippym.uk - chippy, UK, a rodent…)

Serious now. I’m glad that federation means that people aren’t putting all their eggs into the same basket; sure, feddit.uk going MIA is a loss, but just imagine if it was a non-federated platform. Hopefully the old users will be able to build their new home in the new instance.

This text made me realise something: “defed or not defed” discussions are ultimately rushed.

Because at the end of the day, most Mastodon instances might defed Threads. Not due to Facebook’s help in genocides or because they’re a big corp, but simply because admins will say “screw it, 90% of rule violations come from Threads users, I’m not dealing with this shit.”

Most people don’t even know what’s a proprietary image format. From their PoV it would be “shitty broken Mastodon doesn’t show images properly”. And they would still pressure Mastodon users to switch.

if Threads won’t display in a browser they’ve just blown one of their legs off.

I’m not sure but I think that a similar strategy could work for browsers, using a web plugin.

But even if Meta decided that Threads is unavailable from browsers, it wouldn’t be blowing one of Threads’ legs off. There are far more mobile than desktop users nowadays; and if they want to EEE the Fediverse, they need numbers for that.

Note: I did read your comment fully, but I’m going to address specific points, otherwise the discussion gets too long. (Sorry!)

“Some data format” is still a pretty vague handwave […]

It is vague because there are multiple ways for Threads to screw with the Fediverse through data formats. But if you want a more specific example:

Let’s say that Meta creates a new image format called TREDZ. It fills the same purpose as JPG, but it’s closed source. The Threads app has native support for TREDZ images, but your browser doesn’t render it.

If you access a Mastodon instance through Threads, everything works well, since the Threads app has support for other image formats. However, since your browser and current Mastodon apps have no support for TREDZ, pics in this format fail to render. You get broken content as a result, and probably some Threads crowds screeching at you because you ignored their picture, saying “u uze mastadon? lmaaao its broken it doesnt even pictures lol”, encouraging you to ditch your instance to join Threads instead.

And you might say “reverse engineer TREDZ, problem solved”. However:

• reverse engineering is costly and time-consuming
• Meta has professional coders in a paycheck, Mastodon relies mostly on volunteers
• Meta could easily encumber TREDZ with all sorts of nasty legal shit, like parents, and aggressively defend them.

As such, on a practical level, it would be not feasible to reverse-engineer TREDZ. And even if it was, the time necessary to do so is time that Threads is still causing damage to Mastodon.

Of course, this is just an example that I made up on the spot. Meta can think on more efficient ways to do so.

I’m sure that Meta would just love to be able to push a button that made all their competitors die. […]

Yup. As you said, everyone wants that button. But due to the difference in power, Meta is closer to get that button than Mastodon is.

the Fediverse seems pretty solid against attack to me.

The protocol might be solid, but the community isn’t. Communities stronger than the Fediverse died; and the Fediverse has the mixed blessing of decentralisation - the death of a part doesn’t drag the other parts to the grave, but the survival of the other parts doesn’t help much the dying one either.

The difference is the same as between boiling a frog* by throwing it in hot water, versus throwing it in cold water and heating it slowly.

In the defederated scenario, people resist to ditch Mastodon and go to Threads, for ideological reasons. The only ones who’d do it are the ones who are pissed at Twitter alone, and short-sighted enough to not realise that the issue with Twitter applies to traditional social media as a whole.

In the federated scenario, however, that resistance has been slowly degraded. Because Mastodon users are already interacting with Threads users, forging social bonds with them, and they’ll try to avoid to lose those bonds.

I’m more worried about the load if it truly gets big and mastodon and threads interact a lot, tbh.

I’m a bit worried about this, too. You toot something, it gets insanely popular, and now Threads users hug your instance to death, the old Slashdot effect.

*inb4 boiled frogs are bad science, but a good analogy.

I fully agree that it doesn’t matter for Lemmy right now. The issue is mostly Mastodon and Kbin, as both compete directly with Threads; and in a smaller scale Friendica, Matrix and PixelFed as they compete with FB/WhatsApp/IG.

The main reason why I support defederation is to not have users in Mastodon relying on contacts and content from Threads at all. Because, once Threads pulls off the plug (eventually they will want to), Mastodon won’t be some small but stable network; it’ll be a shrinking one, and that’s way worse.

Sorry for the wall of text.

What specific features do you have in mind that could be implemented in a closed-source manner that couldn’t be reverse-engineered and implemented by open-source instance software too?

The features don’t need to be impossible to reverse engineer; they could be costly enough to do so, rely on other FB/Meta platforms, or demand server capabilities past what you’d expect from typical Mastodon instances. For example:

• implementing some data format that is decoded by the front-end
• allowing you to access content from FB/IG/WhatsApp from Threads
• “we now allow big arse videos”.

and it’s unclear what benefit it would serve Meta that they can’t accomplish by just not joining the Fediverse in the first place.

Killing a bird and a baby mammoth with a single stone, before they grow and invade your turf.

On one side you have Twitter/X; it bleeds money and Musk is an idiot, but he has enough money to throw at the problems until they go away, and he has a “vishun” about an “errything app” that would clearly compete with FB/IG/WhatsApp. On another you have the Fediverse; it’s small and negligible but it has potential for unrestricted growth, and already includes things like Matrix (that competes with WhatsApp) and Friendica (that competes with FB).

From Meta’s point of view, Twitter/X is by far the biggest threat. It could be addressed without federation, but by doing so would feed Mastodon, and a stronger Mastodon means a stronger Fediverse and this power would put Matrix, Friendica etc. in a better position. With federation however they can EEE one while killing another, and still advertise the whole thing as “I don’t understand, why you say that we have a monopoly over online communication? We’re even part of a federation? Meta plays nice with competitors. I’m so confused~”.

They might not be inherently bad, but they’ll be likely bad depending on how it’s done, and Facebook isn’t to be trusted.

Just for the sake of example:

• What if Threads develops features that work well with the ActivityPub protocol, but since they’re closed-source they cannot be implemented by Mastodon instances?
• What if Threads implements asymmetric federation - where Threads users can interact with outsiders’ content, but outsiders cannot interact with Threads’ content?
• What if Threads has some bullshit term of agreement like “by using our platform you agree to have your data collected, and if you’re seeing this you’re already using our platform”?
• etc.

Note that Facebook has a long story of user-hostile decisions; as in, this crap wouldn’t be below its moral standards. So, while most of the time this would be FUD, in this case it’s just F, no uncertainty or doubt.

I think that Facebook is trying to kill the Fediverse and Twitter, before either becomes a real competitor.

It makes sense when you look at the big picture; Facebook’s power is mostly Facebook itself (connecting people), Instagram (sharing pictures), and WhatsApp (“private” [eh] messaging). Microblogging has a small market in comparison with those three, but it opens a door to them - so both the Fediverse and Twitter have room to expand right into FB’s turf.

So in the case of the Fediverse, if my reasoning is correct (dunno), the third “E” would be the traditional “extinguish”, not “exploit” as proposed in the OP.