this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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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!

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Here is the post where I was told to upgrade since 0.19.2 didnt work too well. https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/post/216846

Also, it might be a good idea to remember that the 0 as first digit means lemmy is far from „ready“ for general use, just to manage expectations.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Upgraded and it works well it seems, thank you!!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Thanks!

I gave a crosspost or two that doesn't seem to have worked, will rhe come alive :-) ? Anyways I'll check if a next one works as expected.

Will do and thanks so much for the support 😊💖!

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Now I understand: I thought that federating Threads was a deliberate choice, but it was probably an incidental phenomenon simply due to the large numbers managed by your instance.

Probably one of the ten Instagram executives who have a federated profile has tried to search for one of your contents. Or he found the message of a followed user who participated in one of your threads in his Timeline. Or they are simply experimenting with your instance...😁

I said the wrong thing here. Excuse me~~In any case, there is at least one other Lemmy instance, probably for the same reason: it is an instance that handles quite large numbers anyway:~~ ~~https://sh.itjust.works/instances~~

EDIT: no it is not true: https://lemmy.world/comment/7949266

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

sh.itjust.works explicitly blocks Threads. They held a vote among the local users: https://sh.itjust.works/post/11308397

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Um... that's not what it looks like from the relevant page: https://sh.itjust.works/instances

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's in the "Blocked Instances" section, where it should be.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

You're right, sorry 🤦‍♂️ 🙇‍♂️ : the federated instance was threads.ruin.io, not threads.net

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Federation should hapen automaticly when a user subscribes to content on another instance.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yes, but I can't "find" Threads content from Lemmy.world

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm not a fan of this either.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I understand your choices well. We have made an internal evaluation on the opportunity to federate Threads with our instances: with the mastodon poliversity.it instance we decided to silence Threads; with the Friendica poliverso.org instance we used the newly introduced functionality to obfuscate all the personal data of our users towards Threads; with the Lemmy feddit.it instance, however, we decided to leave the federation to try to allow Italian Threads users (feddit.it is an Italian-speaking instance) to use activitypub groups and discover the "free Fediverse"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Great example of how there isn't any one right answer here, it's different for different instances. Can I quote this in the "What will instances do? Opinions differ!" section of https://privacy.thenexus.today/should-the-fediverse-welcome-surveillance-capitalism ?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Thanks! Here's how it looks:

InformaPirata describes another situation involving groups of instances with different stances ...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Thanks for the mention. This is a very interesting and informative page for all users of the fediverse

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I agree with this. We should leave the door open to Threads users that may not know the Fediverse.

We can always de-federate later if Threads misbehaves.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yes, I think so too, but it is a choice that is up to the administrators because it can have dramatic repercussions on the maintenance of the server

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Of course you are right (sorry, but in my message I wrote federata instead of defederate)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

God likes voluntary suffering

[–] freamon 1 points 8 months ago

It's possible that someone from lemmy.world found one of the Threads accounts they were using for testing, but they're not testing it anymore (or have maybe changed the requirements)

If you do:
curl https://threads.net/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:[email protected] | jq .

you get:

{
  "subject": "acct:[email protected]",
  "links": [
    {
      "href": "https://www.threads.net/ap/users/mosseri/",
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json"
    }
  ]
}

but if you do:
curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' https://www.threads.net/ap/users/mosseri/ | jq .
you get:

{
  "success": false,
  "error": "Not found"
}

This is what happens when lemmy searches for something remote, so it errors with The webfinger object did not contain any link to an activitypub item if you try from there.