When Meta launched their new Twitter competitor Threads on July 5, they said that it would be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon, and all the other decentralized social networks in the fediverse “soon”.

But on July 14, @alexeheath of the Verge reported that Meta’s saying ActivityPub integration’s “a long way out”. Hey wait a second. Make up your mind already!

From the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say “a long way out” is a clear victory for the free fediverse’s cause.

  • loaf@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    It’s almost as if the entire point of Threads was to use the Twitter hate to harvest more personal data with zero interest in creating an actual longstanding platform. 🤔

    • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Threads is pretty blatant about censorship and sharing of user data. They use terms like “a friendly space” and “convenient” to sell it to users. So you’re actually losing something by jumping ship from Twitter. The one positive for Musk era Twitter was an attempt to reduce censorship, but the crazy things the company did otherwise far outweigh it.

      One of the shitty things profit driven social media sites do is curate content to create a more advertiser friendly space. It even extends to special interests and government interests. I mean what do you call that when public information is curated by the government. I sure as hell don’t want my US government telling me what I can and can not discuss in a public venue.

      In the USA there’s a little thing called the first amendment. Granted these are companies and don’t necessarily have to adhere to civil rights in the same way government agencies do, but in effect they’re doing the same thing. The US government should absolutely not be coercing these US companies into censoring content, which they are.

      • RaincoatsGeorge@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        Reduced censorship, so long as what you’re posting paints musk in a positive light, doesn’t upset him, and so long as it’s mostly racist.

        Reduced censorship. Lol. No man, just no.

    • outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I’ll stop when capitalism and governments no longer exist.

      (By government, I mean the institution of a group of rulers and attendant enforcement, used to compel others to do what they would otherwise not).

      • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Governments will always exist. Sorry to burst that bubble. They always have and they always will.

        • featured@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Lmao you think there were governments when early humans were wandering around the plains of Africa in tiny little tribes?

          E: Downvote all you want but by the definitions being proposed here then all species have governments because they snatch food from one another, which is an immensely asinine description of ‘government’ since it describes and means effectively NOTHING

          • Kalkaline @lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            As long as there is a limited supply of resources there will be some form of economic distribution and a government to settle disputes about that distribution.

          • outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, the fatalism is sad.

            People lack both the knowledge to realize that different forms of society already existed (and do, currently), and imagination to realize that it’s possible to move towards a different and better form.

          • gonzo0815@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            So you want to reduce humanity by 99%? Because hunter gatherer lifestyle isn’t sustainable with more than 100 million people.

            Oh and you also want to go back to a life expectancy of 40 years, barely any useful medicine, exorbitant child mortality, countless women dying at birth and the constant fear that your surroundings will kill you.

            Sounds great!

            • featured@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Huh??? I never advocated for going back to a pre-agriculture society society at all, i was pushing back against the idea that governments ‘have always existed’ because of course they haven’t, that’s patently absurd since they are social constructs

          • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Human history. The oldest history of humanity we have is the Sumerians. From that time on every large group of people formed a government. Babylon. Arkadian. Egyptian. Greek.

            Other forms of government are tribes. Hunters. Gatherers. Those are tribes.

            Show us people that didn’t have a form of government and we’ll be impressed.

            • outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 year ago

              I see, if you define government as “any collection of humans,” than yes, it’s always been extant.

              What I meant, however, was a group of rulers that use force to compel others to do what they would otherwise not.

              Written history is also a blip terms of the duration of the history of humanity, too. Something like 1%. We can access some of the rest via anthropology.

              • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Yes. Those types of people have always been around. Have you never read history before? You can aCkuALY all you want to, I don’t care. I’d rather you left that shit attitude at reddit, though.

                • EremesZorn@beehaw.org
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                  1 year ago

                  You’re out of line. If anyone has the reddit attitude of casting aspersions rather than rebut effectively, it is you.

                • outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org
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                  1 year ago

                  Ah, that’s just the point - the types of people have been around for awhile, but the institutions supporting them — backing militias, basically — have not.

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    They did something similar a few years ago.

    At one point they opened their messenger system and allowed XMPP clients to connect. This worked absolutely fine, and chatting in any XMPP compatible client was possible.

    But it was also possible to OTR encrypt the data so Facebook only got seemingly random character strings that are absolutely useless for data harvesting and profile analysis to sell to advertisers, so they closed down the messenger and disabled the XMPP bridge not long after they opened it.

    Same will happen here: As soon as people start interacting in a way it is not possible for the company to track everything, they will stop allowing it.

    On a personal note: I will defederate from Meta as soon as they establish their ActivityPub bridge (it of course will only be a bridge, or does anyone really think they would base one of their main features on an open standard?)

  • hoodlem@hoodlem.me
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    1 year ago

    When a company says “a long way out” it often ends up meaning “never”. Fingers crossed.

    • Kichae@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I think it makes entry into the EU easier, but they’re receiving headwinds on two fronts there. There’s no need for them to implement federation if they can’t overcome the other regulatory hurdles first.

      • Jon@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Yep. Federation could conceivably respond to the EU’s requirement for interoperability – and they could do it in a way that puts a lot of barriers to people actually moving, so works well for them. Of course the EU would say that didn’t meet the requirement, which would lead to a multi-year legal battle and eventually Meta would probably pay a billion dollar fine (as they routinely do – it’s just a cost of doing business) and promise to remove the barriers (which they wouldn’t, and then there would be another multi-year legal battle).

        But none of that works if the EU won’t allow Threads for some other reason!

        Still, my guess is that they’ll figure out a way around the EU’s objections to Threads … we shall see …

          • suoko@feddit.it
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            1 year ago

            Like “standard phone calls have always been interoperable” ?

            Like “batteries should be replaceable” ?

            Or “documents file formats should be open” ?

            ActivityPub should probably become a login standard, somehow as standard as SAML. Any social network should propose to login with AP, just like any social let you use email or phone number to register.

    • jocanib@lemmy.world
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      I think they may have realised that federating whilst they’re still not allowed to operate in the EU would hand hundreds of millions of EU users to independent instances.

      • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I still don’t get their target audience for Threads.

        Facebook users don’t want to leave their weird boomer Internet bubble. Instagram users will continue posting pictures on Instagram and advertise their linktr.ee account where they link to their 18+ content because they’re not allowed to link in directly from Instagram, and 𝕏 users … well … they will continue using 𝕏.

        Ironically the only ones wo really care about Threads is people in the Fediverse.

  • esaru@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    If someone plans to move to my neighborhood and that one has a record of burning down houses, it’s not a good idea to give it a chance.

  • Called it. I’d be prepared to bet that in a few more weeks, Meta’s just gonna quietly drop the idea of ActivityPub integration all together. To me at least, it always seemed like the whole “planned Fediverse integration” for Threads was just them trying to jump on what they saw as the latest buzzword bandwagon.

    Had Threads been released a few months earlier, you can bet they’d have been talking about “Metaverse integration” instead.

    • Freeman@lemmy.pub
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      Every “mainstream” (ie: not tech focused) source I have seen discussing threads has been keenly missing the whole federation component and focused on it being a twitter replacement competition.

      The whole federation thing is probably too abstract for most.

  • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I reminded of the end of season 1 of Foundation, where the Foundation stayed hidden from the empire for a long time, growing in strength and technology.

    Season 2 is pretty good so far

  • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s ironic, considering how much we’ve been fighting over whether to let Meta in or not.

    Fuck me, that’s exactly how society works, some bully doing something, the normal people fighting over it, then the bully going “never mind lol”.

    • Jon@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      That’s true, although I’ve been saying all along that Threads’ potential arrival is a great opportunity whether or not it happens.

  • MyOpinion@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    You mean all of the ridiculous bullshit complaining and bragading that has been going on here for weeks was pointless?

    • Reclipse@lemdro.id
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      It was always pointless. If Meta or anyone tries to join Fediverse, there is no stopping them. There will always be some instances that will federate with them.

      What Lemmy needs is an instance wide blocking system, so users can themselves decide which instance to block.

  • dystop@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Called it. I said this last week when everyone was still hysterical about blocking Meta:

    Everyone is talking about defederating preemptively because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.

    Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. So, doing what any exec does, he looks for buzzwords and trends to make his new product more exciting. Hence the fediverse.

    From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.

    TL;DR below:

  • BeardedPip@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    If I don”t want something to happen, I”d much rather a corporation say “a long way out” than “never going to happen”. Something on the back burner of a corporation is as good as dead. Something an exec said no to just needs a change in leadership to make happen.

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I haven’t heard a single valid reason why federating with Meta is bad. Only people misunderstanding how technology works.

    edit: remember pretty much all objections can be solved by personally blocking the domain, rather then forcing it to be blocked for everyone. Also that all the information Meta could possibly get, they can already get regardless because all of our content is public.

    • Thorny_Thicket@sopuli.xyz
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      The user base on a platform like Threads is probably quite different from that of Lemmy (or reddit) Federating with them means their content is starting to also flood to our platform and in a big way due to their huge number of users meaning that we’re getting our faces stuffed with facebook quality content that many specifically is trying to escape here.

      • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Then block their domain. Problem solved. Any other objections that can’t just be resolved by personally blocking the domain? Don’t ban it by default, give users the choice to ban themselves or not. There’s no downside.

        • esaru@beehaw.org
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          There is a downside: Because many people don’t see the negative long-term effects, Facebook will have enough time to influence and dominate the Fediverse in a negative way. The masses don’t see what Facebook is doing in the long run.

          There’s also not much reason to federate with Facebook. Sign up there if you like that network.

          • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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            I say not federating is influencing the Fediverse in a negative way. Since I obviously don’t agree with that, it’s more content. I don’t like gatekeeping and this sense of toxic superiority that fedi users are above average Meta users. I want to talk to my family. Same can be said with your influence argument, they can sign up there already and use the fedi, which means they’re being influenced already.

            I’m extremely against this gatekeeping and want these users. That’s the whole point of social media, to communicate with people. More people is more content, which is the whole point. I don’t want to only communicate with smug users who think they’re superior to a normal person.

            • Elevator7009@kbin.cafe
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              I’m very suspicious of Meta and its intentions. I also don’t think I’m better than a Meta user except in my choice of social media platforms, which is only even possible because I haven’t gotten myself into social groups that primarily communicate there. Not everyone is so lucky. If my social group were slightly different I might be a resentful Meta user holding my nose because I would value having a social life over avoiding a company that’s got pretty much everyone entangled anyways. I’d probably try to get people to move platforms, and probably complain about Facebook and Meta as often as I could without annoying everyone, but it’s very likely that they wouldn’t all move off the platform just because one person in the group hates it.

              Meta users are welcome to come here. I want everyone to have a non-enshittified, non-corporate social media and that includes people who are currently on an enshittified corporate social media. But Meta itself is not welcome. That means no Threads, no touching us with Meta, go make a non-Meta Fediverse account first. Even if defederating them might not be the most effective, even though they can scrape all our stuff regardless of their federation status, I want to send the message that Meta is very unwelcome here. But its users are welcome. We shouldn’t try to hoard the non-enshittified place all to ourselves. Only gatekeep the place from people who will try to enshittify it—and Grandma from Facebook is not going to try to squeeze us for cash.

              • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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                So you want the users, but not them to enshittify it, but you also want them magically to come without federating because you think you have a superior sense of social media. Which reality are you in, and how do you intend for the fedi to magically become mainstream with this zero compromise dream scenario you’re coming up with? I don’t even agree with gatekeeping people you think are shitty, because there’s already a terrible fedi population out there like creepy anime instances, truth social, and kiwifarms, etc. Those are all much worse then what you’ll find on Facebook and are already on fedi. Has it ruined the network?

                This is just completely idealistic hoping that wants a situation that will never happen, has already failed to happen, and is ignoring the reality of the situation. For the fedi to grow, it means also shitty people coming. That’s where the proper moderation tools become important.

        • Thorny_Thicket@sopuli.xyz
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          Lemmy doesn’t currently give the option for users to block individual instances. If it did then that would indeed be a better solution

  • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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    I don’t consider that a victory at all. Meta could bring the Fediverse to the masses. And allow anyone to follow and interact with their friends on Threads.

      • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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        So that…people will use it?

        I mean the whole purpose of social media is to interact with others.

        Maybe you prefer spending your time interacting with strangers. There was once a time when social media was actually about networking with friends and family and people you otherwise actually knew. That’s why I joined.

        Also to get more people AWAY from the tech giants and basically reimagine advertising and business as we know it.

        I mean really it’s good for everyone who’s not a conglomerate tech company.

        • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Hm, so you’re giving a new API free of charge to all the AI tech giants in the era of AI. How is this bad for them?

          • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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            …because people will realize there are better platforms without privacy violations and ads where they can still interact with their friends and transition.

            Like Mastodon and others have basically all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks.

            • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Without ads YET. Once the “masses” arrive, donations are no longer an option.

              • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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                I mean they could try it but people would just migrate to a different server so there would be no point.

                The main Mastodon instance has 1.5M users and no ads.

                • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Is 1.5M users “the masses” to you? Reddit has like 400M active users monthly. That’s the scale I’m talking about.

                  Registered users is a very bad metric too.