On 4/19/26 4:54 PM, Jason J.G. White via luv-main wrote:
Russell Coker via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
Firstly a disclaimer, I dislike Facebook for many reasons and would prefer it if the company went bankrupt and shut down. But as that's not going to happen and there's an estimated 17.7 million Facebook users in Australia (almost 2/3 of the population) we have to deal with that.
Thank you - I didn't appreciate that Facebook was still so prevalent. I don't have an account there, and I don't plan to obtain one at this point, unless there's a good professional reason.
I got my account there when it was only open to .edu folks. When it became a real cesspit I merely stopped using it and my account has been dormant there nearly 15 years. I've logged in there maybe 10 times in that period and have not much use at all for the deprecated, proprietary monolithic networks like it that are antithetical to traditional computing in the vein of FOSS, Linux, and now the ActivityPub and other aspects of distributed networking in the Fediverse, going back even further to the BBS days (back then it was AOL that people thought was the entire Internet). It doesn't really matter much to me, but I'll never acknowledge or participate in a place so removed from my computing reality, but then again, as someone who only became an MCT to teach the MCSE program for many years from NT 3.50/3.51/4.0.... because UNIX gigs weren't as prevalent then, I haven't operated a Microsoft Machine in a few years now either, so perhaps I'm an anomaly, but happily set in my freedom from FacePlant, InstaSPAM, etc. If there's really that many zillions of people interested in FOSS, Linux & the BSDs, and privacy, then I'm sure any "Non-Unique presence by a longtime LUG would just be swallowed up by all of the other apathy addled groups there, effective at driving folks away from that monolithic silo. Without considering that mess over there, I'm plenty busy with the task of interdicting and eradicating proprietary, privacy-disrespecting, closed source computing software as it is, and tending to the folks who actually are ready to make that tiny step over that threshold is fun.
Threads federates with ActivityPub, so you may be able to post to that from a Mastodon, Pleroma or GoToSocial instance without having an account. As I understand it, though, Threads is entirely separate from Facebook, though owned by the same company.
It, "sort of federates", and not unlike other instances, that federation is moderated with limited reach, for business reasons that are indeed sound practice for a deprecated, privacy-disrespecting, monolithic silo operation. You'll need to create an InstaSPAM account, as odd as that might seem, in order to utilize Threads. Much of what happens throughout the Fediverse does not make it into federation in Threads, but other than that, I don't follow any of the specifics. One might thing that you need to have a Faceplant account, but then again, InstaSpam is about pictures with few words, and Threads is about just the words, so I guess... maybe they go together like coffee & cream? For a while, right around the time Threads was incubating, we had Wildebeest (Sic). It was kinda fun, and free too - until you looked at all of the other parts of the requirement to self-host. It flopped, because it was a joke on itself, but was a comical attempt at Cloudflare's very best effort to NOT Capture a network that really doesn't care if you try anyway. Much like Linus has stated that Linux really doesn't care what other OSes are biting their nails over. https://github.com/cloudflare/wildebeest And that brought be back full circle to why it doesn't really matter to me who participates at Faceplant for whatever reason, even though it's usually because the user thinks it's the actual Internet, and not just a monolithic silo host. -- Bradley D. Thornton Manager Network Services https://NorthTech.US Key available at: https://keyoxide.org/A0E3913390670CCE