The fediverse is discussing if we should defederate from Meta’s new Threads app. Here’s why I probably won’t (for now).
(Federation between plume and my lemmy instance doesn’t work correctly at the moment, otherwise I would have made this a proper crosspost)
The whole point for me moving to the Fediverse was to get away from companies\platforms like FB\IG,and Twitter. Federate all you want with Meta I just hope there’s a running list of which instances does and doesn’t federate with meta so I can join the latter. Not sure why people are so hot on looking at pictures of people’s ugly kids on 2 platforms.
This is why I use a paid host for Mastodon. Six bucks a month gets me my own instance with a custom domain and full admin rights.
There are three of us on said instance, and only two of us are active. It’s easier to build a consensus that way. Absolutely none of us want to federate with anything Meta/Facebook. I preemptively blocked threads.net yesterday. To quote Khan Noonien-Singh:
“Let them eat static.”
Which host are you using btw? If you don’t mind sharing that is.
I use masto.host for my instance. They even give you a web GUI for all the settings. Makes hosting so much easier!
Very nice!
See, that’s the nice thing about a federated solution. I can use my personal instance that federates with Mata and you can use one that doesn’t and we can both be happy and still talk to each other. Being able to pick an instance that suits your preferences is the biggest selling point of the fediverse.
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Do you want Facebook to do to us what Google did to XMPP???
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Yup they can mess up the fediverse in the near future
https://fabulous.systems/posts/2023/06/meta-is-a-danger-to-the-fediverse/
https://fediversereport.com/meta-plans-on-joining-the-fediverse-the-responses/
And there’s Google’s with their new privacy policy states that it can use publicly available data to help train its AI models
They only cares about money and unlimited growth.
That happens whether they are defederated or not. They have 1.6bn users, the rest of the fediverse is a rounding error.
This is what happened with XMPP:
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. …
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
Even if the entire fediverse defederates from the Meta instance, they have a huge network which already exists. And people who want the things that a huge network brings will want to be part of it. Mass defederation will just push some people onto the Meta instance because it’s the only place a huge network is operating (and many already have an Insta account so they’re already on it anyway).
That’s not to say that federating with them is necessarily better. Some users will prefer a smaller network. Some instances will want better moderation than Meta are likely to provide. Moderation issues might make it nigh on impossible for most instances to federate anyway.
But you can’t stop them dominating the fediverse by universally defederating. That is not an option. Gmail got big enough to not need XMPP federation; Meta and other potential mega-corp instances are already huge, they don’t need us at all.
The best hope might be for several mega-corp instances to hold each other hostage. Google could kill XMPP because none of its users understood that they were part of a federation and barely noticed when the tiny proportion of non-google users disappeared. But if there’s a Meta instance and a Google instance and a Mozilla instance … it’s hard for one of them to unilaterally withdraw without handing their users over to a competitor.
I addressed the point about Facebook dominating the fediverse in another comment in this thread. To keep it short, it’d be like they just popped up another platform like Reddit, Twitter, etc, and it wouldn’t really change the trajectory of the fediverse that much, since it’d be no different to another monolithic social media platform.
And for people that want the fediverse to stay small, that would be fine. For those coming from very large sites like Twitter or Reddit, it often will not be because the value of those sites comes from the size of their networks.
It won’t kill the fediverse but it might kill the various dying-mega-site migrations. For some that will be welcome. For others, not so much.
There isn’t a one-size fits all here. The biggest danger is the fediverse devolving into a paranoid war of words solely because some people think there should be.
I came from Reddit, and personally I would rather see slow growth rather than having the fediverse dominated by Facebook.
I am an associate member of the FSF though so there’s a sort of purist bias that isn’t there with most Redditors 🙃
I understand where you’re coming from, though. People resist change, and so people coming from monolithic platforms are more likely to want another monolithic platform.
I don’t think it’s that people want a monolithic platform? They just want a network that is big enough to provide enough new, high quality content to keep them amused/informed.
Back in the day this was a constant struggle for bulletin boards (the best of which were focused on a particular hobby or area of interest). Too small and the place was dead, often with a lot of poor quality content with no one around to correct it. Too big and it became impossible to moderate, and difficult to keep track of who was reliable and who was full of shit, and difficult to find what you were interested in if a handful of threads took off and pushed everything else out of sight.
After BBs mostly died, I used Twitter and Reddit as newsfeeds with informed commentary attached, plus bonus cute animal content. Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin aren’t (yet) big enough to fulfill that role. Not enough of the commenters and sites I want to read stuff from are on it, and there are too few users to rely on to fill the gap.
At work, we want to switch. We use Mastodon and Twitter atm. But there are not (yet) enough specialists in our field in the fediverse for it to work. A small fediverse just can’t do the job we need it to do. (FWIW we’re public sector researchers; this is about disseminating research and finding collaborators, not advertising products.)
There is no one size fits all and neither should there be. The danger is that the small-is-good parts of the fediverse disappear because the content devolves to endless bitching about what other instances should have done and why won’t they all agree with us (even though we’re not a monolith, honest).
Thats the nice thing about fediverse. People with different opinions can co-exist and they have freedom to choose what they want
Big enough is nice but I’d rather have a small community without anything to do with the big tech.
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Do you want Facebook to do to us what everyone else did to open standards???
Build a closed alternative, ignore that we even exist, bind all the users and have us fall back to the low levels of relevance we had before Twitter and Reddit went crazy.
At least with open standards we have a slim chance at giving our input on how we want things to be.
It’s nice that you think Facebook will care about or be influenced by any input we have. They won’t play nice, if you think they will, I have a bridge to sell you.
We only stand a chance if we cut them off from the fediverse completely. If we don’t, they will throw their weight around and kill the rest of it.
Reddit and Twitter are massive, and we’re becoming more and more relevant, even though they both still exist. One more service we aren’t connected to won’t exactly make us irrelevant, we have momentum.
Could you please be a bit less aggressive? The post is titled “Why I probably won’t defederate from Threads” and I’ve given my personal arguments. I’ve also addressed the points you’re making, both in my post and in other comments over here.
It isn’t titled “Why you shouldn’t defederate from Threads” or “Why we shouldn’t defederate from Threads”. It’s not even titled “I will never defederate from Threads”. There are many valid and well-written arguments for defederating. I posted my counter-arguments for a bit of balance yet I have no intention to force or even convince anyone to do as I do.
So let’s please be civil around here and not go around brigading people who have different opinions with arguments they have already heard multiple times. If you want to set a good example, then do that for a respectful discussion just as much as you try to do it for the ethical aspects of federation.
I read it. Your points, especially about how they’ll have to play by the rules, seem a bit naive. Theoretically, those points should have applied to Google and XMPP, but in reality, Google just threw their weight around and killed it anyways. It’s very likely that Facebook will do the same.
Sorry if I seem a bit aggressive, I just don’t want to see this thing we have die because of the influence of a megacorporation.
I don’t see how Google killed XMPP. They removed it from their own application which is the exact same effect as not speaking an open protocol in the first place. Nobody forced other XMPP-based applications to change. You know what made me stop using XMPP and not keep my Jabber instance when I moved to a new server? Clunky applications and the fact that everyone I had in my contact list was also on another more comfortable platform (at first ICQ and MSN, later Discord) and prefered to contact me there.
If we federate with Threads, they may use their power to push changes to ActivityPub but nobody forces any of us to implement them, making them effectively irrelevant. If they do something that’s incompatible with the rest of the fediverse, they effectively defederate from everyone else. So either way the end result is two separate sub-fediverses and the more popular one will win out. Hint: it’s gonna be the one with billions of dollars of funding. If we let them in as long as they play by the rules, we have a chance to educate people on what’s beyond Threads, it gives Meta something to lose if they defederate (their users’ ability to talk to people in their friend lists). At least we don’t lose anything that we wouldn’t also lose by not talking to them in the first place.
When they removed XMPP, they disconnected the Google users from the rest of XMPP. And since it was the largest instance, XMPP as a whole basically died. People couldn’t use XMPP to stay in touch anymore with people using Google’s thing, and vice-versa, which XMPP as a whole kind of came to rely on. I don’t know much more about XMPP, but anyways, most of my points are general and not XMPP-specific.
Also, cutting them off from the fediverse won’t have the effect you’re trying to say it will have. It’ll just be it’s own thing, just like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc are now. And the fediverse thrives in spite of them.
And please, stop assuming Facebook will play by the rules. They won’t.
When they removed XMPP, they disconnected the Google users from the rest of XMPP. And since it was the largest instance, XMPP as a whole basically died. People couldn’t use XMPP to stay in touch anymore with people using Google’s thing, and vice-versa, which XMPP as a whole kind of came to rely on.
And how is this different from not using XMPP (or being defederated) in the first place? Their platform would still have become huge and pulled over users. People don’t use a platform because they like the technology. They use it because it has people they want to talk to. Even google themselves had to accept that with their failed Google Wave which didn’t even survive the closed beta because people who got an invite couldn’t talk to their friends who didn’t get one.
And I’m explicitly not assuming Facebook will play by the rules in the long run. I’m saying while they do, let’s talk to them, even if it’s just for a month. When they eventually start breaking the rules, we can still defederate and I assure you that we won’t lose significantly more users than we would have if we had defederated earlier. Because why would we? We’re on the side of the open-closed divide that values privacy and open source software. Our only reason to ever switch to Threads is to talk to people that aren’t on Mastodon/Lemmy/Whatever. If that’s a requirement for someone they have to do that either way. But for someone who starts out on Threads, we might suddenly create an incentive to create a Mastodon account to keep talking to their friends. They probably won’t leave Threads but they will use both, pulling the fediverse into the public conciousnes.
Its interesting how aggressive some people can get if you respectfully state your opinion
Have a look at the upvote to downvote ratio on the top level post. Currently 22 up / 9 down. I can fully respect people not agreeing with me, it is a controversial opinion after all. Fine, ignore it or respectfully post an on-topic reply and move on. But actively marking it as “this is bad” or leaving replies that just repeat arguments that I’ve explicitly addressed… I don’t get it. Especially when my last two paragraphs are literally:
I hope this gives you a bit of a different perspective on the whole discussion. I’ll still respect anyone who sees things differently and will actively follow the discussion. I’m just annoyed by all the identical knee jerk reactions that have been floating around.
If I see new arguments or the discussion quality on Threads is bad enough that I have to block half their users I might still defederate for them but for now I’ll keep calm and wait for the situation to develop.
If a person thinks your idea is a bad one, downvoting and walking away is just about the least aggressive they can be, though. Especially if they see other people have already left comments that reflect their opinion so they couldn’t add anything.
I guess there are different opinions about what downvotes are for. Personally I think they shouldn’t reflect if something matches my opinion but if it’s worth reading. For me, a downvote says “this is badly written”, “this is rude” or in general “this shouldn’t be on people’s front page”. I will gladly upvote a post/comment that contradicts my personal belief if the author put effort into it.
I understand a lot of the arguments made and in reality you’re right, if they want our data, they’ll get it.
However, I also think that making it as difficult and therefore expensive as possible for them is a legitimate way to respond and make it clear to them that they are here on sufferance and not welcome. That might be seen as immature and pointless and maybe that’s so, but I do think it’s important to defederate from Threads to demonstrate our collective unwillingness to become their commodity.
Your argument is fully valid and defederating might be the right thing to do for you.
In the end, I have to weigh their cost to scrape my data against my cost to access content that I need. As someone who has built scrapers for scientific purposes before, I can tell you that building something that scrapes Mastodon and Lemmy instances is not a single cent more expensive than getting my data through federation. It’s also probably a lot more reliable because they can get everything, not just what their users subscribe to. On the other hand, my cost for accessing my friends’ and family’s posts as well as corporate social media accounts if I don’t do it through federation is creating an account in their proprietary app. And then they will be able to get a lot more of my data than they could ever scrape from my Mastodon profile.
I take your points entirely and I do understand why you feel the way you do. Maybe what I’m saying is more symbolic - a gesture - than a realistic chance of fending them off but I do feel it’s important to send that message, even if it costs them nothing financially.
I only use one Meta product (FB) and only that because its a way to stay in contact with family and friends that are just not technically able to migrate to a healthier platform but I don’t use their app. I use the website, with Social Fixer, in a Firefox Container and use Frost on my phone. I have managed to get all my family and some friends to switch to Signal rather than WhatsApp and I have zero interest in Instagram. I think using mitigating methods and technologies like these, in conjunction with defederating from Threads (is it going to be one central instance?) is a viable way forward.
I don’t see who this gesture is aimed at. Meta execs won’t care. They lose nothing. The result will be the exact same as building a closed platform from the start. And the users won’t even notice because the mainstream doesn’t even know that the fediverse exists.
I agree that getting people away from Meta should be our priority. But we don’t do that by cutting them off from the fediverse and then begrudgingly making a Threads account to talk to the people we haven’t won over yet. We do that by showing them that there alternatives that they can use without losing access to the content they already follow.
Sure, Zuck isn’t going to give two shits that you and I might defederate from Threads and maybe it is just a gesture but I still think it’s one worth making. The crux of it is - do they care enough about getting the data from .world or .helios42.de to go to the trouble of building a scraper? If they don’t, then defederating is the right thing to do, in my opinion. If they do then you’re right, its pointless.
I’ll tell you a secret: they care enough to scrape everything. Not only the fediverse, every single website that’s accessible. And that’s not a thing for the future, that has been a reality at least since google became popular. Do yourself a favor and look into the server logs of an average webhost and you will find a whole bunch of crawlers. Some are for search engines, some are for other purposes.
I wrote my M. Sc. thesis on specialized crawlers (back in 2015) and you wouldn’t believe how much research has gone into that and how effective modern crawlers are at finding every single thing that ever got uploaded to the net. The only thing needed is enough hardware to throw at the problem and that’s exactly what Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and all the others have. As a rule of thumb, if archive.org or your favorite search engine has indexed it, everyone else has it as well or has access to someone they can buy it from. There is no such thing as unscraped content on the internet (unless you lock it behind access restrictions and those would apply just the same to federation).
Edit: I don’t have access logs enabled on my instance and obviously can’t see what happens on other instances but I would bet that this very thread will be picked up by at least five different crawlers before the day is over.
Yeah, I know. My own access logs on all the VS I have control over are disabled. I still feel something, even if that something is purely symbolic, is better than nothing.
There’s also the case where it is ILLEGAL for them to try to procure our data through non-consensual means. This is why threads is not launching in Europe.
Its interesting that everyone focuses on the privacy and the EEE risk of this, but my reasons for leaving Facebook were that Facebook is actively-allowing-the-promotion-of-genocide-because-not-moderating-is-better-for-their-bottom-line Evil. I left facebook because I’m not willing to provide the (even infinitesimal) boost to their network effects that my account had. For the same reason, Threads is an instant defederate on launch.
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I think federation with Meta would be the best way to encourage low effort Facebook stye content, which sucks. Ban Meta.
“It forces them to play by the rules”
They will play by the rules because that’s the Embrace step of EEE, not because anyone forced them to.
A valid point was made here that we should probably have a small section of the Fediverse federated with Meta as a way to access Threads without leaving the safety of the Fediverse.
But the rest should defederate. We must protect what we fought hard to gain.
That might actually be a feasible compromise.
Thankfully my instance admin isn’t going to defederate
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No is not. Just do another account and join Therad. They are the “good guys” right? So I’m sure they will allow third app access to their contents, if not just download ther app as any other social.
But that choice should be up to instance owners and people shouldn’t pressure them either way. It’s their instance, after all, not yours.
We should leave instances who federate with threads.
If it’s a big public instance, the decision should better be democratic.
Exactly the point I wanted to make. Hopefully that came across.
Interesting take, but I am still defederating them to hell and asking others to do so. Facebook’s moderation approch is to allow the most hateful cingeng under the guise of fair political speech and I won’t stand for it
I won’t be sucked in some other big tech social if I don’t intend to. The moment my posts are accessible from Thread is the moment i will burn all my posts to the ground, just as I did before. My stuff can stay on my Hard drive for all i care.
defederating means that people who want to connect with someone on the platform are forced to install it. fuck that. not defederating gives people an alternative and shows them using the fediverse means they don’t miss out on anything regardless of platform.
if I want to access threads content and I can do it using my existing fed account without installing their app and giving them access to my heartrate, microphone and bowel moton stats then frankly that’s a win for us.
Here’s my problem/concern have you read their privacy policy? I want no part of that, would being federated with them mean that they get to siphon up all of my data too? If so I don’t think the defederating goes far enough…
They can siphon your data no matter what you do. As I’ve said in other comments, everything on the internet has been crawled and scraped for literal decades. This post is already indexed by a bunch of different search engines and most likely by some other scrapers that harvest our data for AI or ad profiles. And you can do nothing about it without hurting your legitimate audience. Nothing at all. There’s robots.txt as a mechanism to tell a crawler what it should or shouldn’t index but that’s just asking nicely (mostly to prevent search engines from indexing pages that don’t contain actual content). You could in theory block certain IP ranges or user agents but those change faster than you can identify them. This dilemma is the whole reason why Twitter implemented rate limiting. They wanted to protect their stuff from scrapers. See where it got them.
Most important rule of the internet: if you don’t want something archived forever, don’t post it!
Maybe a separate fediverse instance defederated from the rest of them, and the rest of them defederated from Facebook, would be a better way to go about it, if we really must connect to them. Cut them off from the main fediverse, but still interact outside their platform.
Its your choice as instance owner to do that
Visit https://fedipact.online/ to see a list of instance owners who will defederate their instance from Threads
Heads up: its a long list
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Threads is not a Lemmy instance, but it is implementing the ActivityPub protocol and thus will be able to federate with Lemmy instances, Mastodon servers, presumably kbin, Friendica, GNU Social, etc.
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Ask your instance to defederate from them.
Has meta given any indication that they want to federate with other instances?
Yes. They’re coding ActivityPub into threads.
You don’t buy a car if you don’t want to use a car.
What on earth is Plume?
What exactly is Threads?
How does any of this work?
I thought I had a handle on what Mastodon was, but then there was this threads thing, and Lemmy is apparently also part of the Fediverse but not Mastodon, I assume, and Threads is its own thing, and calckey and kbin exist, maybe, and I’d never heard of Plume until this post…I don’t understand any of this. Reddit and Twitter are how I would generally follow this sort of happening but Mastodon and Lemmy are ghost towns I don’t really understand how to use. I’m so utterly lost I don’t even know where to begin with finding answers. I don’t even have known unknowns, just unknown in unknowns.
don’t lose your head over this. lemmy, kbin, mastodon and apparently threads (the new twitter alternative by facebook/meta) are all part of the fediverse, which means they all follow a decentralised approach. mastodon and threads are microblogging platforms, while kbin and lemmy have a similar format to reddit. because they are all part of the fediverse, all these platforms communicate with each other and you can use kbin to subscribe to microblogs such as mastodon and have them appear in your feed. defederation basically means cutting the link between one server and another, so they can’t communicate anymore.
you can use kbin to subscribe to microblogs such as mastodon and have them appear in your feed.
How does that even make sense? They’re completely different types of content.
If Threads is just another Mastodon instance why does anyone care?
If everything is just decentralised instances what are kbin and Lemmy, exactly? They’re not instances in themselves, are they?
@koberulz @murphys_lawyer
Threads isn’t just another Mastodon instance. Threads uses a similar format to Mastodon, and they may communicate with each other, but the similarities stop there. Threads will probably have some proprietary features to make it “stand out” from the others. Also, if many people jump on board Threads, the thing is that Meta will then have a monopoly on the Fediverse, which is the exact thing the Fediverse is trying to extinguish: Monopolies controlled by corporations.The “monopoly on the Fediverse” argument is something that I explicitly wanted to counter in my post. The fact is, Threads will become one of the largest if not the largest instance in the Fediverse, if we federate with them or not. Their users don’t sign up to Threads to talk to us, they sign up because it’s the hot new thing from Meta. If we defederate right away, they become their own bubble, their users never know we’re there and they can do to their platform whatever they want.
But if we federate with them as long as they play (relatively) nice, their users will get used to being able to talk to us which gives us leverage. They will be bound to use the same protocol as us or their users will complain about not being able to talk some of their friends anymore and maybe even migrate to an open alternative. And if they still want to go through with a change we don’t like, we can still refuse to implement it.
Our choice is not between Meta having a monopoly on the Fediverse and everything being as we want it. It’s between them having an alternative to the fediverse that will overtake us within weeks and having a slim chance at being treated as equals.
While I agree that it is probably better to not defederate them right from the start, I believe that the Fediverse might not have that much leverage. This recent blog post about the history of XMPP describes it pretty well: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
Of course it’s different because this is social media and not just 1:1 privat messages. But for us to actually have some leverage/impact we have to generate a lot of (good) content so that Threads users will actually notice and complain if that content “vanishes”. And at the same time we must not become too dependent on their content
This is more of a warning against monopolies than access. Businesses applying resources to the Fediverse can only help it grow as long as it does not completely take over. Competition, whether it be individuals, businesses, or government, can help keep it healthy and guard against anticompetitive behaviors.
As I said elsewhere: this would still have been the case if Google hadn’t used XMPP in the first place. All those people you have lost when Google defederated either wouldn’t have been on XMPP at all or care enough about privacy and open source to have both. It’s not like you have lost anyone who had been there before Google started using XMPP. Same with Threads. Every single user who is on the fediverse today will still be here if they defederate (unless they leave for other, unrelated reasons of course). Considering our existing userbase’s interests, I don’t see many people giving up their existing accounts in favor of a Threads account.
Mostly answered in my other comment but for visibility and completeness, I’ll try to answer it here again.
The content may look different on the surface but that’s mostly because the different applications present them differently. Under the hood, it’s almost identical. Users create posts, other users can reply or like. What differs is the details. Mastodon posts are by default limited to 500 characters, Lemmy/kbin posts can be a few thousand, Plume posts can be even longer. Mastodon and Plume only have likes, Lemmy and kbin add dislikes (downvotes). Posts and comments that come from a different application may look a bit weird in whatever you use but at least they show up in your feed and you have the option to click a link to see them in their original form. In facht, @eatyourglory@mastodon.uno’s reply to your comment came from a Mastodon instance and they will see my reply in their Mastodon feed.
As for the difference between kbin and Lemmy, they’re two different pieces of software that interact with the Fediverse in a very similar way. When someone wants to setup a Reddit-like fediverse instance, they can freely choose between them based on personal preference (I chose Lemmy for my instance because kbin is harder to install and update). Imagine them like being able to choose between a phone by Apple, Samsung, Huawei or Nokia. All those phones have their own specific pros and cons but because they communicate through the same protocols, they can still talk to each other. An instance would be analogous to your Samsung phone or my Apple phone or my partner’s Nokia phone. There are many fediverse instances that use Lemmy as their software same as there are many Samsung phones in the world. The fact that most of them have very unimaginative names (looking at you, https://lemmy.ml/ and https://lemmy.world/) doesn’t help but as positive examples like https://beehaw.org and https://feddit.de. Both use Lemmy and can talk to any other Lemmy instance but their names make it clear that they are their own thing.
Mastodon = Twitter Lemmy = kbin = Reddit
No idea what Plume is, but I may Google it once I post this.
Threads is Metas (Facebook parent company) attempt to grab a share of the Twitter market share as Elon does his best to decimate his company.
If I understand correctly, Threads uses the same/similar publication method as Lemmy or kbin or Mastodon so the data can be freely shared between them all. So in that sense, you could argue that Threads was just a Mastodon instance being run by a company that has shown little regard for its users, and far more regard for its profits.
Note: this is a very, over simplified view of the landscape that isn’t technically correct however is an attempt to convey a picture that helps put the pieces together in a somewhat relatable way.
Plume = Wordpress I think?
Yeah, I had a bit of a browse and that seems right.
Lemmy is a piece of software. Lemmy software is a link aggregator - same as reddit.
So you’re signed up to an instance of Lemmy which is installed on the server at lemmy.ml - this means that the server you signed up to (lemmy.ml) is running a copy of the Lemmy software. Other servers also run the Lemmy software making them also instances of Lemmy. As well as you being able to talk to users in Communities on the lemmy.ml server, you can talk to users in Communities on other Lemmy instances. For example, I’m registered on the server at lemmy.world
KBin is also link aggregator software, just like Lemmy and Reddit. Same things apply there, same software on multiple servers, all able to talk with each other.
Mastodon software is a microblogging service - same as Twitter (and Threads). Just like instances of Lemmy, instances of Mastodon can talk to each other. So a user on mastodon.world can talk to (for example) a user on kolektiva.social which is also running the Mastodon software.
Plume is blogging software - like WordPress, but just like Lemmy and Mastodon, it can be installed on multiple servers, all of which can talk to each other.
There’s also Pixelfed (Instagram), PeerTube (YouTube), Friendica (Facebook) and a large variety of others.
Now, as well as all these different types of software (Lemmy, Mastodon, KBin, PixelFed etc) being able to talk to other instances of the same software on other servers, because they are all underpinned by a single method of passing information called ActivityPub, each type of software can also talk to each other - so you as a Lemmy user can also see posts (like the one you and I are responding to) from a user on a server running an instance of Plume. Some people here are commenting from a Mastodon instance. All these things are loosely joined together making a joined (federated) universe - the fediverse.
Lemmy is apparently also part of the Fediverse but not Mastodon, I assume, and Threads is its own thing, and calckey and kbin exist
The wiki can help here: https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_are_Fediverse_projects%3F
What people call “the Fediverse” is a collection of web applications that talk to each other through an open standard called ActivityPub. ActivityPub defines what users, groups, posts, comments and likes are, how you can subscribe to them and how they travel between instances. People have built different software packages that all use ActivityPub but have different user interfaces to feel similar to different “traditional” platforms. Mastodon is like Twitter, Mastodon and kbin are similar to Reddit, PeerTube is similar to YouTube, Pixelfed is similar to Instagram or Flickr and Plume is a long form blogging platform similar to Medium or older versions of Wordpress. Because they all use the same protocol under the hood, they can generally talk to each other. The user experience isn’t great yet but you can already use your Mastodon account to post to a lemmy community or to comment on a Plume post. Imagine it a bit like email where Gmail’s web interface, MS Outlook, Thunderbird and dozens of other clients exist as well as several different Mail servers. They can all talk to each other even though they were written by different people and all have their own interpretation and extensions to the SMTP and IMAP standards that define how emails work
Threads is a new microblogging Application by Meta (Facebook / Instagram) that will probably work very similar to Mastodon. In contrast to most other fediverse applications, Threads won’t be open source but will still use ActivityPub so it will be able to talk to existing open source applications. People here are afraid that they will abuse that to spy on people or systematically archive everything that happens in the fediverse in order to sell your data or train AI with it. They propose that we defederate from Threads (meaning we block our instances from talking to Threads’ instance). My post contains my thoughts on why that isn’t as useful as people think it is.
Hope that helps. If you still have questions, I’m happy to answer them to the best of my knowledge.
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This is a good take, imo.
I never understood the privacy concerns. Well, I do insofar as it’s safe to assume Meta is privacy-hostile. But many seem to think using Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. are some how “private” corners of the internet when they’re anything but. It is very trivial for someone to access public data on fediverse sites as you’ve pointed out, and if they want that data they’re going to get it.
The beauty of the fediverse is that we can choose who we trust with our core data, such as sign-up details, IP addresses, etc. Signing up to the Threads instance/app would be a disaster from a privacy perspective, but just treating them like any other server and taking advantage of the increased engagement from the content their large instance will post will likely increase content available on the fediverse and engagement across the board. Any decision to defederate with their instance(s) should purely be based on content and nothing more, imo. From a cross-server perspective, they’re no different than any other large instance.
… could you argue that federation content from a cc-by-sa licensed instance would be in violation on a commercial instance? Meta is a us corporation after all
