This is unhinged. Someone building the mainline of an interoperable communication service should absolutely be helping others making software trying to interoperate with it. Complaints can be made about Rochko rejecting PRs, but complaining that other people’s time is going towards a thing they don’t want is insane.

“So they reached out to us and we had conversations about what they want to do, how they can do it, and we had more detailed conversations about how to do X, how to do Y protocol-wise. We helped them resolve some issues when they launched their first test of the federation because we want to see them succeed with this plan, so we help them debug and troubleshoot some of the stuff that they’re doing. Basically, we’re talking with each other about whatever issues come up.”

But from the perspective of hundreds of instances have signed the anti-Meta FediPact, and hundreds more are blocking Threads without signing the pact, any resources devoted to to improving the Threads/Mastodon integration are wasted.

Nah, give those National Parks posters a Mastodon account. Way more desirable than POTUS. Also put all those other random gov Twitter accounts on it so they can link somewhere that anyone can read.

I mean, it’s not like he’s reading the Threads users’ comments either.

Just a totally straight blog about ice cream and cool cars, with no mention of politics.

If an instance defederates from another instance there’s nothing stopping a user who liked that instance that was defederated with from moving to, making an account on or just using (in the broadest sense) another instance which hasn’t defederated with the instance they like or that instance itself.

This functional consequence of defederation is telling their users they shouldn’t be allowed to interact with an instance. That they can just leave if they don’t like it doesn’t make the choice not coercive. Moving servers is certainly a viable option, but it’s a pain and doesn’t transfer content, so that’s still locked under the former server’s federation choice.

That’s one reason I moved to the fediverse: so I could get rid of all of the content I didn’t want to see before I saw it. More typical social media like Meta, Twitter and Reddit all have a long history of failing to moderate against anti-trans hate, as with other types of hate, so I moved to the fediverse.

On Mastodon, which is the place Threads is trying to federate with and which Katy was comparing it to, you can block instances. You no longer need your instance to make those decisions for you. Your desire to have Threads blocked at the instance level is at odds with Katy’s desire to follow trans people on it. You can do a simple thing to implement your desires without forcing anything on the other person.

What do you think the effect of “defederation” is?

Yeah, I’ve never even heard of them before now and would have no particular reason to trust that what they mean by “good” servers aligns with what I’d consider “good” servers. This isn’t like joinmastodon.org trying to strongarm instances to adopt their personal federation policy.

Well then I guess the pro-trans thing to do is tell Katy she shouldn’t be allowed to follow all those trans people.

Who is this Mastodon CEO you think is controlling Mastodon’s culture? Rochko? He doesn’t have any influence on what posts anyone sees on Mastodon. Mastodon doesn’t have a central server or moderation team, and their algorithms are too dumb to instill a culture or even present a single unified culture. I see posts from people I follow, and people they boost, that’s it. It’s like a step removed from RSS feeds.

Public benefit companies are for-profit, they just can’t be sued for not maximizing it.

Mastodon not being Twitter has been part of my ongoing description of it when asked. If you liked Twitter because you might rub elbows with important people, watch the drama in real time, or go algorithmically viral for a sick burn (or alternately something cool), you’re not going to get any of that on Mastodon. If you want microblogging to subscribers, it’s got that. If old school “people actively shared me” virality is enough, it’s got that. But it’s not going to replace Twitter, because Twitter was a culture and an algorithm as much as it was a microblogging site.

If Lemmy had more people it could be almost a 1-for-1 Reddit replacement (still a little confusing with multiple communities of the same name/topic). Mastodon can’t do that for Twitter.

I can’t tell if the Bluesky team is bad at business or planning some sort of eventual rug pull. They’re certainly a for-profit corporation without any evident way to generate profit, and their words and theoretical design all sound like they’re not easily compatible with profit, but multiple profit-focused entities have given them a lot of money for something that, if implemented as envisioned, will not make them any richer.

My only guess is some form of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish where the core server is better than the rest of the network, but the network exists to assuage fears about another social network implosion or protect from potential antitrust issues while not being a real threat, but it feels like a complicated way to make Twitter 2.0 and get rich.

As long as there’s a profit motive involved, enshittification seems like the expected conclusion. We could just be at step one. From Doctorow’s description of the enshittification cycle:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I saw zero spam and multiple posts talking about spam.

Mastodon allows some artistic nudity

This is akin to saying “the Internet allows some artistic nudity”. Like, what do they think Mastodon is? Who is allowing it? “Mastodon” also allows hardcore porn. Or it doesn’t. Or moderation is spotty. Or it’s collapsed behind a warning.

Journalists, do like the barest minimum of research before simply relaying statements from company spokespeople.

And users don’t even necessarily need to set up their own instance. There will be defed-heavy and defed-light instances users can just choose from based on personal preference. The instance mostly just matters for who federates and internal moderation policy (which is aligned), so it’s not like anyone will be forced one way or another.

deleted by creator

Reports are now resolved automatically when the associated post/comment is marked as deleted. This reduces the amount of work for moderators.

Are deleted and resolved posts still visible to moderators? This seems like a tool for abusive accounts to dodge moderation by deleting their posts before they’re up long enough to get moderated. Reddit had a similar issue with bad actors being able to delete/edit their previously removed posts to hide the content from moderators reviewing the account to see if their activity patterns were worthy of a full ban.

Sure, if they clone Reddit then I definitely could see it, though I think Lemmy communities are a much bigger risk for them to open up to since they’re so moderation dependent. At least with Mastodon what you see is all based on your follows. Reddit loves to abdicate on responsibility by just leaving it all to the mods, but I don’t think Meta can get away with that, and especially when they don’t directly control the mods.

All your stuff is already public on the internet without any special access being granted. If they want the convenience of receiving ActivityPub packets and metadata, they can just stand up a honeypot instance and some fake accounts. The Fediverse isn’t built for privacy.

Threads isn’t going to federate with Lemmy. It’s not the same sort of communication and the crossovers are ugly and confusing. Mastodon is where the real federation/defederation decisions will take place.