Technology

The author complaining about Threads defederation from spinster was a pretty big red flag. It's on every mainstream mastodon blocklist I've seen and it's obvious he knows why. Really leaned into that "how can they discriminate against women!?" dog whistle that TERFs love to use.

Edit: Oh, it turns out he's married to the person who runs that server. He's also worked with Gab, used some of their code for his soapbox, and seems to have been involved with Trump's truth social. No wonder his feelings are hurt.

'omg Meta's blocking nazi instances!'

1. Gleason is a transphobic idiot.
2. poast and spinster are blocked by everyone for hate speech.

Shouldn't let threads in anyways, fuck Meta

Tl;Dr: The most hateful and problematic instances that exist were wisely blocked by Meta, and the admins have found a workaround that lets them see Threads posts, but doesn't let Threads users see their posts.

They don't even have to defederate meta? What a lucky server!

Therefore, I am a proponent that Threads should not block any servers at all, unless the server itself is behaving badly from a technical standpoint. They should moderate every user on an individual level, regardless of which server they're on, using the extensive moderation tools at their disposal.

Haha, no. There are certainly good reasons to block entire servers when their userbase is horrible. A theoretical* instance that is based on hate speech doesn't need to have each individual member vetted when the server itself is a terrible concept. A server that actively promotes brigading would also be worthy of defederating without needing to spend time reviewing each individual account.

Where the line would be drawn will vary based on opinions, but the free speech absolutist idea that banning entire servers is always wrong is just plain stupid.

*Theoretical because I don't know of an example off the top of my head even though one or more most likely exists.

Meta is blocking Nazis... oh wait, I get it. This is a PR stunt to show the gullibles in the fediverse how much M(ark)eta has "changed." Sure, there might be a historical shift of right wing populism everywhere because of Meta's content regulatory practices but they've changed guys. C'mon.

"Threads is blocking servers on the Fediverse"

tragedies abound

Methinks Gleason protests too much

I find it interesting that Meta Platforms, Inc., a company known for harvesting user data, is blocking some servers from fetching its public posts. They decided to implement a feature Mastodon calls Authorized fetch.

This was always going to happen. They will block agressively, because they can't have their precious advertising money mixed with CSAM, nazis and other illegal content. And the fedi is full of that.

Funny, there was a thread a few days back where people were raging about Meta being able to "harvest" the data they were posting in public on the Fediverse, and one of the ways people were insisting that Meta could be stopped was with "authorized fetch." That's exactly what Meta is apparently using in this case to block those servers, and which has been trivially worked around.

Public data is public, any attempt to make it conditionally public is just going down the DRM dead-end.