Project92 and the Fediverse - A Smarter Battle Plan to Protect the Open Social Web
www.timothychambers.net
With the upcoming #meta #Project92 Fediverse service, there has been a, well, robust discussion of how to avoid threats looming. Those advocating mass-preemptive defederation make three cases for it. ➡️ To avoid data mining … However, defederation does virtually zero to avoid any big tech entity scraping all the Fediverse public social graph today - Want proof? See here: is.gd/q8U2pv But what if they merge that Fediverse data with their own internal data from IG isn’t that worse than just scraped data?

It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:

  1. Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)

  2. Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)

  3. Defederate (wait and see)

  4. Defederate with the intention of staying defederated

  5. Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too

It’s all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.

In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?

I’m not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.

  • AnonymousLlama
    4•1 year ago

    Yeah that’s something I’ve not seen discussed here much. I get that people want control, but getting started with an ActivityPub centric site (like kbin) is now cheaper than ever. Get your own cheap hosting on a VPS and handle some traffic.

    People can even create their own instances just to federate with everyone and absorb their content if they’re worried about the rules and regulations or “x server not connecting with y”

    Overall I think it’s a pretty good system compared to a single silo like Reddit

    • Obez
      3•1 year ago

      Except when people choose option 5 from this list and defederate you because of who you are federated with.

      • BobEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Yeah dude people will absolutely defederate your ass if you federate with bigots or whatever. No one is owed federation or a platform of any kind.

        Federation is not a right, it’s a privilege.

      • AnonymousLlama
        1•1 year ago

        That’s one of the most glaring issues I see with activityPub. The Reddit style, I’m going to block you because your follow XYZ sub mentally.

        I’ve got no solution for it besides hiding which places federate with who, but by looking at the content you’d be about to make an educated guess anyway