Adam Mosseri:
Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.
And I have moved my mastodon account to an instance who actively defederated Threads. I’m not interested in interacting with anyone on that network.
And I’m fucking sick of the “content relevant for me” thing. I interact with people asking/giving help, discussing and so on. Mindlessly consuming “content” is simply a disease.
Mindlessly consuming “content” is simply a disease.
Agreed. It’s like a lot of other unhealthy addictions.
I don’t get why Mastodon servers feel the need to fully defederate from Threads. Silencing them is much better. It allows your users to follow Threads accounts without people who don’t know anyone on that side getting overwhelmed by the global timeline, as Threads is about twelve times bigger than the entire rest of the Fediverse combined.
Nobody is moving from Threads to Mastodon because mastodon.zip decided to defederate all you’re doing by blocking them is preventing the users with friends who use Threads from using your site correctly.
Of course some platforms, like Lemmy and Kbin, don’t support moderation features like silencing, it makes sense to fully defederate in those cases, but only because of technical restrictions, really.
How many reasons does Meta have to give before distrust is the default?
“Hey, admin, why can’t I follow my mom on threads from your instance?”
“Because Meta facilitated genocide in Myanmar.”
While Facebook’s recommendation algorithm definitely plays a part here, most of this analysis could have "Facebook " replaced by “the internet” without changing any of the meaning. The same hate speech is also spread across WhatsApp (which caused WhatsApp to put a limit on the amount of times you can forward a message) and every other messenger.
Facebook’s automatic hate speech removal system may be pitifully ineffective, at least they have one. Here on the Fediverse, we have a slur filter, just sometimes, and even fewer moderators per user than Facebook has.
And, despite Facebook’s role in helping spread hate speech as a large platform and refusing to proactively go after such speech, here’s how the rest of your conversation will go:
“Hey, admin, why can’t I follow my mom on threads from your instance?”
“Because Meta facilitated genocide in Myanmar.”
“Aw, that’s bad. Anyway, I’ll just create a Threads account I guess, my mom is sharing my niece’s baby pictures.”
why wont threads friends go to mastodon
Same reason why Telegram friends won’t go to Signal: they don’t care about the platform they use, and you end up being that friend if you ask them to change their habits for you.
Once Threads support federation in both direction, the need to move disappears completely. Why would you move to a server run by volunteers that sometimes goes down when Elon says something stupid, especially if your Mastodon friends can interact with your account like normal. That’s ActivityPub working and doing what it’s supposed to do.
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It’s great that everyone is able to choose for themselves
And I have moved my mastodon account to an instance who actively defederated Threads.
Is that pretty easy to do?
fairly easy. you can export the list of your followers and followed account, block lists, bookmarks and so on, and import them in the new account. the posts you’ve made aren’t moved, though. https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-another-server/
Thanks
the posts you’ve made aren’t moved, though
That’s kind of a fail, and a feature that could be added (with some work).
Anyone who doesn’t understand that connecting in any way to Facebook is not a good thing … is either very naive, or complicit to wanting to take down the fediverse.
Facebook already has enough content and enough of a platform on their own – they literally control half of the worldwide social media network. Why do they want to spread into this new space?
The only reason they want to be on this side is to conquer or destroy.
This perspective of “Either you agree with me or you’re complicit in a conspiracy against me” is incredibly childish and immature.
Sometimes people have different opinions than you. Try to find a way to deal with it.
To me it’s like warning someone to not stand in the middle of the highway, and having some guy go “don’t tell me what to do, I have the right to disagree with you”.
There are idiots in the world and their opinions are actually idiotic. :)
It’s 100% super obvious that Meta wants to control the fediverse, and that’s why they are coming for it.
Can you explain how it’s 100% super obvious? I thought a popular platform with many users entering the fediverse might be good for exposure but it seems like the consensus here is that it’s actually bad. Help me understand how it’s bad?
- Most people using a service don’t want it to suddenly explode with new users who might not behave in the way that old users like
- Facebook don’t want to just be another instance and have a lovely time with everyone, at best they want to seek profit, and based on every other way they seek profit it will be by tightly controlling the experience, filling it with ads, and selling off user data (i.e. all things that most of us came here to escape from)
In summary we know everything Facebook does is pretty evil, it’s “super obvious” that this will therefore be pretty evil too, right?
selling off user data (i.e. all things that most of us came here to escape from)
Since almost everything on the Fediverse is open for all to see, anyone can already be mining the data just by setting up their own instance of Lemmy or Mastodon. This might make it difficult to sell fediverse-generated data for profit.
I’m sure they have a plan (otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it!), maybe it relies on using their app which also has your real name and phone number, maybe it’s for some legal loophole which means all fediverse users technically agree to their terms just by federating. I don’t know what they’re up to, but given their previous behaviour I think it’s safer not to even let them try!
Maybe it’s to avoid getting hit by antitrust sanctions and some EU legislation:
“Look, we’re open, we’re using the same ActivityPub protocol as thousands of others, our users can choose to leave whenever they want” - Meta, probably
(…then 99% of their users proceed to DGAF and stay on Threads)
Ok yeah make sense! I’m definitely not a fan of Facebook’s and Meta’s data policies either.
But how is anyone going to control a decentralised platform tho? What you’re describing seems like it would only apply to users on instances controlled by Meta, i.e. on threads itself. Or maybe I still don’t understand how the fediverse works.
One way I can think of is by being such a big player that they dominate and can thereby exert their will. For example, lemmy.world is the largest lemmy instance and we’ve seen a few communities on other instances dry up in favour of the ones on the big server. Now imagine that server is a hundred times bigger than the next largest and the people in charge have an active financial interest in moving people to their platform - if they play it carefully (and I’m sure they’ll be employing people to think about how to do this) they can shift the existing content into a place they can control it.
Alright I see, thanks a lot for explaining
That doesn’t really apply to Lemmy’s content though, since unlike Lemmy.world, Threads users won’t be able to create /c/ communities. If a Threads user wants to post to a community in a way that Lemmy recognizes them, they’ll have to post it to one under a Lemmy instance’s control, or Lemmy users won’t see a thing.
Normally and with very many other issues … I would agree with you … but on this issue I’m very adamant about what I see and believe.
Think about it … Facebook is a billion dollar corporation and they show interest in your little world and the little things you are doing and they want to join you. This is a company that already has billions invested in systems that already have billions of users and millions of dollars of man power and technological resources. Why do they want to step into what we are doing here? Why do they feel a need to step into our space? Do they need more users? Do they need help from us?
Big corporations are only interested in perpetual growth at all costs. They are also deathly afraid of competition or the potential of future competition. Look at the history of manufacturing, automotive corporations over the past hundred years … it’s a long history of the strong eating the weak.
I agree my argument may sound childish or extreme but in this instance it’s pretty clear … if you let them in, it’s basically the beginning of the end for the fediverse.
It’s the metaphorical Trojan Horse … once it’s inside and firmly established, everything will be lost.
Why do they want to step into what we are doing here?
I think there’s a much simpler explanation. Elon’s actions are causing users to want to leave the platform. Meta wants to pounce on this opportunity. ActivityPub is an established, open source protocol that allows Meta to quickly spin up a Twitter competitor. The federated nature means that Meta can reduce regulatory risk. At the same time, they can lobby for increased scrutiny of Twitter since it isn’t interroperable like Threads.
I have no idea if this is actually how Meta is strategizing. But what I definitely know is that Meta absolutely doesn’t consider federated social media a threat. They aren’t trying to squash us. They’re aimed at Twitter. If they make some change that degrades the experience for us, absolutely we should consider defederation. Until then, let’s try to make some converts out of Threads users.
It’s a type of squashing … they step in, take over, control it and the whole thing becomes something that is beyond our control and becomes another platform that is operated by a private corporation to manipulate and manage thought, content and private freedoms. Basically squashing the Fediverse that we originally wanted to exist.
Once a major powerful corporation steps in and is given access … it’s like allowing a local gang member in your town to use your living room to deal drugs … at first you get some benefits but eventually, they’ll take over your house, throw you out and tell you go somewhere else because you don’t own the house any more, no matter what anyone says.
That’s not how the fediverse works, there is no obligation for any instance to federate with any other, and there are large groups of instances that block each other right now.
Meta can’t throw anyone out of whatever instance they’re on, it’s just not possible.
yes not presently … but one an entity like Meta becomes the dominant system in this universe, eventually, they will build all the keys and controls to regulate it all … that’s the point when they will lock out whoever they want
this is like the debate with climate change … no one really understands what’s going to happen in a few decades so we don’t care … when in reality, the time to do something about some future catastrophe is now … it’s the same thing with the fediverse, don’t allow big corporations in now, because we won’t be able to do anything about it later when they’ve overwhelmed everything.
Meta becomes the dominant system
Meta is already the dominant social network, and yet here we are. They can’t take that back, they can’t stop people from spinning up their own ActivityPub instances (if you don’t know how, go to YounoHost and do it the simple way), Meta can’t stop these instances from communicating among themselves in any way their owners see fit.
Sure, Meta can lock out whoever they want out of Threads… but that’s the status quo already: the whole fediverse is currently “locked out” from Threads, they can’t lock it out any more.
As for climate change, the time to do something was over 125 years ago… so yeah, that boat has sailed many many times over:
https://blogs.bl.uk/science/2016/12/the-first-paper-on-carbon-dioxide-and-global-warming.html
Sometimes people have different opinions than you.
They’re saying that those opinions are naïve.
I see you conveniently left out the bit where they said people could also just be naive. Kind of funny how you attempted to take the moral high ground and lecture this person like they were a small child, yet you yourself cherrypicked in bad faith just to have some little takedown moment. One of you certainly came off more childish and immature in this exchange and it wasn’t the other guy.
Your Mastodon data is already an open book to Meta if they care to have it. The protocol is open, they could already be black-ops scooping up everything that’s fit to federate without turning on Threads federation, so them doing that really changes nothing. And what I mean by that is that they could already have set up unknown instances to leech whatever data they want out of the Fediverse, which instances masquerade as normal mom and pop installs just federating and sucking up everything without bringing anything back to the table. There’s literally nothing stopping them from leeching everything out of the Fediverse at any time other than people being better at detecting their activity (and actively thwarting that activity) than Meta is at keeping it off the radar.
In this case they’re making it so that I might have a chance to follow and interact with people already in the Meta/Instagram/Threads atmosphere without having to convince those people to leave the confines of what they’re comfortable with and find a Mastodon instance to sign up for. Maybe they’ll be more comfortable with leaving Meta after dipping their toes in the open spec?
How is that not a win? If Meta/Threads decide that they want to fracture the protocol and go do their own thing later, so what? We’ll go right back to where we were before they brought their users into the Fediverse. If people decide that they value the Threads extras/connections more than they value the purity of the ActivityPub protocol then maybe Meta is actually providing something that matters and we’ve lost by not supplying that need before the corporate interest figured out that it existed. In that case we’ll deserve the death that causes in use of the open spec, but the open spec will still be there and people who want to do their own thing with it can’t be stopped now. The code to run an open ActivityPub Mastodon instance is already out there and it’s impossible to take it back now.
Everyone is out here decrying this as a subtle takeover of the Fediverse by Meta, but did Facebook “takeover” the HTTP spec when they started operating facebook (dot) com on the world wide web over the HTTP protocol? It’s an insane assertion. I’ve been running my own opensource web servers since well before Facebook was a thing and I’ve continued to do so despite most people opting to depend on a mega-corp to be steward of their online presence. That Meta has a very successful and popular website that I’ve never been a fan of has never impacted my ability to use the open protocol they operate on to continue doing my own thing. The same thing will be true here.
It really seems like people are just upset that Threads might bring ActivityPub to the mainstream and force them to contend with the realization that a diaspora of open spec implementations already lost the war to Meta/Facebook. We had that once before. It was called the World Wide Web and you could go and find forums, fan pages, company websites, and everything else back then that has since moved to Facebook (or other content aggregator sites) because people value the network effects and homogenization more than they care about one big company being in charge of it all. (…and not to belabor the point, but most of that stuff is still out there, it’s just waned in popularity because the network effects are not there.) Here we are with a chance to try and break things out again and people are seemingly worried that we can’t if we let the Meta users in? Maybe they’re right, maybe it’s impossible to achieve victory here, but gatekeeping the standard and enacting some purity test for which providers are allowed on the protocol isn’t going to tip the scales in favor of the open standards implementation.
If the protocol is truly open, then how can a corporation embracing it be a danger? We’re all free to adopt any changes or not at any point in the journey so it’s impossible to lose, you’re free to keep doing your own thing any way you look at it. Tell me how any of this is untrue.
TL;DR: Threads coming to the Fediverse is a good thing. It’ll make it possible to expand the network effects of an open protocol far faster and more than any amount of Fedinerds proselyting the gospel of ActivityPub ever will. The only thing that is at risk of being lost is that we’ll refuse to adapt to what end users want fast enough to keep a large corporation from bending the spec to their ends. Which loss again only means that you’d be cutting yourself off from those who WANT to embrace the revised spec by not adopting those changes yourself. That option (to just not adopt changes to the spec) can’t be taken away from you in the future, so worrying is only warranted if you feel like your ideal ActivityPub implementation can’t win out in the marketplace of ideas and that you’re owed that victory even if others are able to expand it in ways that people actually want to use enough to dismiss whatever downsides it contains.
This was the first comment on this post that made me feel like I wasn’t taking crazy pills. I agree completely. I still don’t see how Threads joining ActivityPub is a bad thing for us, unless it convinces a large number of people to migrate to Threads from their current instance.
The funny part is that blocking the instance makes it more likely that people migrate to threads. We’ve seen that when lemmy instances defederate from the larger problem servers, people will jump ship to be back in those larger communities.
Some people enjoy the “us vs them” exclusive club vibe more than they enjoy the actual content
Tell that to @Gargron@mastodon.social (the creator of Mastdon, AFAIK). He’s very excited about this. And I can’t honestly understand why.
https://mstdn.social/@Gargron@mastodon.social/111576826633308486
Well he’s not alone … a number of relatively vocal “fedi-advocates” are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.
Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where “we” are up to.
From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves “the good guys” and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating “significant” technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They’re all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.
When face-to-face with the prospect of having “your thing” accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. “Growing the protocol” and “growing” mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.
This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they’re “the good guys” and don’t work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their “ethical-tech” world … the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.
Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer “growth” might completely miss the point especially if it’s by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.
And this is where I’m up to on this issue … both sides seem not to be talking about it much.
What is the “emotional”, “social fabric”, “vibes and feelings” factor in all this … that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens … when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL’s loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I’m betting most will feel off … like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit … passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves … “what was the point of coming here in the first place?”.
Now, to be real, it’s not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it’s an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won’t be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? … that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it’d rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)
Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they’re willing to drink for their ends.
For my purposes … I don’t think I’ll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens … the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it … I’d rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.
Not that I care much about Mastodon either way, but you had me up to “Go back to Twitter” 😳
Nothing can be that bad, and even if it was, that doesn’t magically make Twitter any less of a teeming shithole, surely?! 🤯
The communities you like, are shielded by those OSS terms: if Meta does something to the tech that the communities don’t like, they’re free to show Meta the finger. The tech is not, and can never be, controlled by Meta; the communities are not, and can never be, bound by Meta.
Meanwhile, having a company like Meta collaborate on developing and testing the tech, is something positive.
Yea I was really confused to read that. I’m on Kbin / Lemmy significantly more than I log in to Mastadon (I think I’ve opened that app 5 times in the past year), so now I guess I’ll just delete Mastadon.
I bet he’s getting a big bag of money.
Are you truly incapable of imagining that someone might have a different opinion than you without being bribed?
“Everyone who disagrees with me must be getting paid” is not the mature take you think it is.
Are you truly incapable of acknowledging that large bags of money motivate people to do unpopular things sometimes?
I really don’t care about Mastadon as I haven’t used it much, but I couldn’t really think of a good reason for federating with Meta.
Well a good reason could be that it brings federation to the masses. You know, like everyone who uses federated networks wants it to be. This isn’t some exclusive club and wider adoption is a good thing.
If only to prove that it can work.
I wouldn’t call that a good reason to team up with Meta, but I would call it a plausible. Everyone does not want to federate with the largest social media company in the world, I can promise you that. If you like federation, you’d probably like it to not be engulfed by megacorps (unless you stand to profit from it).
So you have evidence of bribes?
That’s cool. Please share with the class.
LMAO… “bribes”… no, I have no evidence of “bribes.” I don’t have any evidence of a financial incentive either, as very clearly evident by my phrasing starting with “I bet…” I’m simply relying on 40 years of not having my head completely up my own ass to make some inferences about things, and if I’m wrong, then I’m wrong. I think you’re being intentionally obtuse. None of this really is impactful, but you sure seem to have an agenda.
You have evidence that I’m wrong, correct?
That’s not how the burden of proof works.
Do you understand what “federating” means? It’s a permission, not an obligation, for the instances to interact. It can also be filtered in any number of ways by any user.
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Just migrate your account to a different instance, if you plan to use it. It’s not difficult and many of them already defederate from Threads (mstdn.social, for instance).
I think I’ve logged in for a collective 15 minutes. I deleted it about 45 minutes ago.
The fediverse means all of them. Mastodon users post to Lemmy and Kbin. We’ll see threads here.
We’ll see threads here.
Not if you block them. Up to you, though.
Let’s apply Occam’s Razor. We all created these juggernaut social media vampires in the 2000s as an alternative to isolated forums and the first federation attempts with Webrings. When it started, Facebook was a good thing.
He could simply be repeating the same mistake the entire internet did by embracing monolithic social media sites in the first place.
Fuck threads
Mark Zuckerturds destroys everything he touches, and now he wants to touch you.
He can touch deeznuts
Nard Zuckerballs
You do not want the lizard prince to touch your nuts.
If this is the level of maturity that’s going to represent the Fediverse, I’m almost inclined to believe they actually do have pure intentions, because there’s no way this shit is financially valuable.
There’s a large number of people here that have a deeply emotional hatred for anything related to Meta and I get that. But these dull comments don’t make for a fun discussion. They don’t add anything. They won’t affect anything. They’re just boring comments wasting everyone’s time.
You’ll get over it, some day.
Well, I don’t think I’m the one who has to get over something, but sure. Thanks for the kind words.
is for profit company
financially valuable thing is all they do
I’m flattered you’ve elected me to represent the Fediverse.
Elon Musk: “Hold my beer”
The difference is twitter is just another big social media platform. Elon Musk isn’t potentially trying to ruin an open source federated alternative that fixes a lot of the problems with social media. He’s just messing around with and tanking a big corpo social media site.
So I honesty don’t really care about twitter as it will get us more users if he burns it down, if the Zuck doesn’t ruin us first.
Basically twitter isn’t a threat to us and could actually be a big help.
Threads could ruin everything we’ve worked for.
I can follow him on kbin.
https://kbin.social/u/@mosseri@threads.net/posts
Interoperability was the purpose of activitypub. I’m not oppossed to Meta , Tumblr and wordpress joining the fediverse.
As long as I can use an open source community platform.Let’s hope this isn’t the first step of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Although in reality it probably is.
It will end up being de facto EEE, the same way it’s become functionally impossible to run your own email server. Sure you technically can, but the handful of big players block everything else and make it impossible to actually email anyone.
It’ll be like that on the fediverse. Big companies like this will dominate the space, refuse to federate with most others except the big players, and people will realize that unless you only want a mastodon instance with like 20 people on it, it won’t be worth the trouble.
That’s not even true, I run my own mailserver for private and a business and it works like expected.
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Absolutely, Outlook.com is by far the worst in this regard. I stopped running my own mail server a few years ago because it was just unbearable.
Are you using a residential IP? There are lists of residential IP ranges for mail servers to block, no matter how well configured.
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Hm, I thought hosting providers should be fine unless you just happened to get an IP in a block that some spammers also used to use… but then again, I stopped self-hosting email several years ago because of all the hoops one has to constantly jump through (for reference, it used to work fine from Online.net’s —now Scaleway— bare metal servers, like 5 years ago).
So what do you suggest, out of curiosity? I have the same assessment, it just seems like the only way it could work, long-term and for all users.
I think the cat’s out of the bag. There’s no stopping it at this point. And even if ever person who runs a Mastodon server got together to push back, defederated with Threads and BlueSky, and tried to stay away, it wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar for these big players.
To be honest, I’m not sold on federation in general for social media. I think it’s an answer to the wrong question. We’re asking “how can we make social media better?” and not “why do we need social media at all?”
Federation has shown itself to be extremely problematic. You have people coming and going from other instances that you don’t control and can’t enforce in any way other than to just block the instance. If I have e.g. a Mastodon instance based around a safe, positive space for the queer community, and others have instances based around bigotry, white supremacy, transphobia, etc. (which they do), then I either allow bigots to come and go, or I have to spend an inordinate amount of extra time on moderation. Same goes for Lemmy/kbin/etc.
People are also continuing to think with a limited frame of reference. The idea of federation is still “how can I get all my ‘content’ in one place?” because we’ve been dominated by these monolithic walled gardens for the last decade. Sure it might be annoying to have to have multiple logins for difference services, but I’d rather that over having a single place where Nazis can come and go as they please with few to no tools to stop them.
Hmm. I don’t know if weak moderation tools are intrinsic to federation. You can certainly ban users from other instances, and if that doesn’t already hide their comments on other instances, it could.
People have talked about going back to disconnected forums recently, notably Kurzgesagt, but it is annoying, to the point where it can kill some spaces which are too niche or frivolous to survive alone. I don’t think r/WTFaucet on Reddit could be a standalone forum, for example. I guess if it saves our civilisation like they were saying the I could make that sacrifice.
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Most of those communities preemptively blocked threads months ago.
What communities are you talking about specifically? I tried but I haven’t yet found a list of those that defederated preemptively. I can’t imagine it’s the majority of instances/users.
100% agree, I think most reactions here are blown way out of proportion even though I can relate to the general “fuck meta” attitude.
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Of course cooperate social media isn’t the only harmful social media, if anything it might be the most civil one for its scale, simply because they’re trying to sell ads next to the content so the content can’t be complete garbage. They also have a bunch of other incentives that ultimately make it a shit experience for everyone, but there is an incentive to moderate.
Something to remember is that it isn’t the company producing the harmful content. It’s people.
Yes it is, but people are sheep. Wolf’s come to get dinner.
Lol, as if Facebook cares about the Fediverse. With its 141 million users, Threads is already ten times bigger than the Fediverse ever was.
ActivityPub isn’t a threat to their business, Bluesky is.
They do. Their business model is to take out upstarts with growing popularity trends. By the time they actually get big, it’s too late.
With several organisations making the move to the fediverse, it is something they want to deal with.
Look at the fediverse’s monthly active users, it’s declining. There’s a pretty solid wall of friction when trying to participate and the vast majority of people won’t ever be a part of it in its current state. There’s no upward tend here and I doubt that it’s ever going to be a real danger for meta.
Isn’t Bluesky much smaller than Mastodon?
At the moment, because it’s almost impossible to get in without knowing someone who’s already in. Currently, after about 10 months, Bluesky has about 2 million users (a sixth of the Fediverse). However, those 12 million Fediverse users have accumulated over seven years. Based on the statistics of fediverse.observer, the majority of those accounts seem to be inactive as well. Mastodon shows growth (about 100k per month) but other parts of the Fediverse are shrinking in activity.
Wikipedia has a graph of Bluesky’s user base growth:
At its current pace, it’ll take over a year and a half for BS to overtake the Fediverse (in total accounts, four or five months when looking at active users), but I expect those numbers jump up when the platform leaves beta. Wait list + current user base on Bluesky already exceeds the reported “active user” count on Fediverse Observer.
My personal anecdata: all the (semi) corporate entities I used to follow are over at Bluesky right now. Some, annoyingly, use it as their primary platform, while others cross post the same way people did when Mastodon gained mainstream attention. A few of the people/organisations I used to follow on Twitter are on Mastodon (almost exclusively people in the tech sector and a government service here or there) but I haven’t seen any growth whatsoever. Various experiments with Mastodon and other fediverse media also seem to have ended, with people leaving the Fediverse for various reasons (Alec from Technology Connections has done nice write-ups of why the Fediverse kind of sucks if you’re “internet famous” right now, and the reactions from Fediverse evangelists below show why that’s going to stay that way for a while).
I want Bluesky to either commit to federation, or for the Fediverse to take over, but neither seem to stand much of a chance against any corporation with VC money right now. Most of the internet doesn’t seem to be interested in federation and even here on Lemmy many people are confused by it (i.e. “I want to send this person a message but when I go to their profile it says I’m not logged in” because they went to the other user’s home instance instead of their own, an easy mistake to make).
I think Bluesky is even smaller. It probably could’ve been a Twitter competitor before threads came around.
EEE doesn’t work with FOSS, where anyone can fork a project and go with it.
Ask Oracle how well EEE worked for them with Sun, Java, or MySQL. Ask Microsoft how well adding the WSL worked to kill Linux.
Threads can try as much as they want, the fediverse is already full of different projects like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Calckey, etc. and they aren’t extinguishing each other.
EEE doesn’t work with FOSS, where anyone can fork a project and go with it.
The point of EEE isn’t outright destruction but marketplace irrelevance. FOSS projects can absolutely be hit by it.
Java actually was hit by EEE tactics from Microsoft, and they were actually rather successful. Sun has to sue MS to stop them from calling their Java VMs Java.
HTML was hit by EEE tactics so well that for years IE was the only game in town and other browsers couldn’t compete.
Sun sued MS to stop them from calling it “Java™”, then Oracle failed spectacularly to EEE it when they lost the API lawsuit against Google.
MSIE’s popularity arose from monopolistic practices by Microsoft, not its EEE tactics against HTML, which failed miserably.
I would know it, I was there: everyone started making websites in Flash because it was the multiplatform solution, even if it had more security holes than a female duck cornered by a flock of horny drakes, only MS sellouts used MSIE’s proprietary extensions to HTML, only Oracle sellouts used post-Sun Java… and it all went down the drain the moment JavaScript evolved to a point of allowing polyfills to make a single codebase compatible with all browsers.
Now all browsers are FOSS-based, with de-branded forked versions making the rounds, and it’s good.
Sun sued MS to stop them from calling it “Java™”
Because that was part of MS’s EEE strategy.
MSIE’s popularity arose from monopolistic practices by Microsoft, not its EEE tactics against HTML, which failed miserably.
Ooo boy you do not remember your history.
When Microsoft started pushing IE, they did everything in their power to sabotage the competition. That included the creation of a proprietary web extension called ActiveX. Back in the day, this, along with non-standard behaviour when dealing with the actual standards, was the reason why many, many sites would not work in non-IE browsers. Developers only cared about what worked in IE, not what was standard. That didn’t change until the arrival of Firefox.
You know how trademarks work? Sue or lose it.
I remember my history quite well, all the way back to Mosaic and before. I also remember “Best viewed with Netscape” websites (1994), when everyone and his uncle had a proprietary plugin they were trying to push, and only a handful of developers (I was one of them) actually cared about any standards. Firefox (2004) came very late to the party, way after the “MSIE can’t be uninstalled from Windows” shenanigans (1997).
You know how trademarks work? Sue or lose it.
Wouldn’t have applied in this case. Microsoft actually did have permission from Sun to use the trademark…right up until they made their Java VM incompatible with base Java, and Sun sued to terminate the agreement.
I also remember “Best viewed with Netscape” websites (1994), when everyone and his uncle had a proprietary plugin they were trying to push, and only a handful of developers (I was one of them) actually cared about any standards. Firefox (2004) came very late to the party, way after the “MSIE can’t be uninstalled from Windows” shenanigans (1997).
Okay? And? None of them had any actual leverage to force people into using their standards. Microsoft had a de facto monopoly on an essential bit of computing software that they leveraged to hell and back to make their proprietary standards THE de facto standard.
Firefox (2004) came very late to the party, way after the “MSIE can’t be uninstalled from Windows” shenanigans (1997).
And at that point, IE had a 97% market share. Care to take a wild stab in the dark why?
Sick, I get tons of more interesting content while being with a Mastodon instance I trust, a nice FOSS client to explore the content, and keep my privacy! If this actually bothered me, I could simply click the three dots and block the instance, so surely that shouldn’t be a big deal, right?
It sounds a bit sarcastic, not sure if you mean it that way. One question: what privacy are you talking about with services that are meant to be entirely open? App analytics?
Being in control of who sees my post. Lemmy still lacks more granular post visibility like Mastodon does. If I restrict a message to followers on Mastodon, I know just they would see it, and so would their current instances which are much smaller and fragmented. Compared that to any social media where that’s going to easily be tracked on both sides. Federating with threads doesn’t change this. Also as you said, lack of analytics is nice. Privacy could definitely be improved though. Mastodon direct messaging is still weird and really should use e2ee.
And nothing of value was gained
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DEFEDERATE, PLEASE! Now Meta has the highest presence in the Fediverse, and they can do whatever they want to it.
Firstly, you can choose an instance that doesn’t federate with them. Everyone can choose for themselves. And second you didn’t read it probably, they’re testing it and there a handful of accounts that have activity pub enabled. That certainly doesn’t make them the biggest presence.
They’ll enable it for everyone soon. Meta will force the Fediverse its way, for $$$. Why else do you think they want to be in the Fediverse so badly?
Mark my words.
I think the reason why meta wants to federate is this:
- it helps with anticompetitive arguments, because it’s “open” and not controlled by meta alone
- some will refuse to use anything from meta, and threads users being able to communicate with them adds value
- it won’t hurt meta, because the majority will be using their app anyways
- it helps their image
I don’t think they’re doing it to “get more data” or to “take over the fediverse”. There’s nothing worth taking over for them currently and since most people don’t care about the fediverse I don’t see it growing much either. Although I’d certainly like it if that were the case.
They can probably get the data already, it’s all openly available. Federating it’s basically all upside and no downside for them, but it’s not exactly the biggest priority to implement it, it‘s going to take some time.
I’m not saying it might not have a negative effect or that they care a lot for what’s currently there. They’ll certainly want to monetize threads sooner or later.
They don’t WANT to be in the fediverse, they HAVE to be. I can’t understand why people find this so hard to read.
Meta just launched Threads in Europe, citing “compliance concerns” as the reason for the delay. This happens at the same time they announce their first step towards ActivityPub. The brand new Digital Market Act requires big companies to open their dominant platform and Meta wanted to be on the front foot before launching, and then get ready to laugh as Twitter get into regulatory hot water. If you want to run in Europe and be a dominant platform, you HAVE to be open.
And Meta just disconnected FB and Instagram from each other citing the DMA. Meta will stop at nothing to trap users in their platforms.
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This is gross. Meta/ threads / Facebook / Instagram are evil and I hope everyone will block / defederate them
i love how excited adam mosseri is about activitypub; it’s a win win for the protocol.
being able to follow the mainstream people on threads as well as the niche people on mastodon through a foss client like megalodon and the move from threads to another instance if i get sick of it will be fantastic and will help both mastodon and threads grow in the implosion of twitter.
Yes yes, encouraging EEE is totally a win-win…
A lot of clueless users will get on Threads and attract attention to it. Then governments, public institutions and other organizations will join it too due to the attention. Open fediverse users will protest against their choice of Threads, but will be pushed back, citing the federated nature of threads. Finally without any recourse, open fediverse users will start following these Threads accounts for important updates. And then fine morning, meta will announce that they’re cutting the federation due to ‘spam from the open fediverse’. And the open fediverse users will be left high and dry without updates from these important accounts. Many will resist it and stay on the fediverse. But a huge population without such strong moral stances, will abandon the fediverse and move to Threads to retain their access to the important updates. And the fediverse will become a shadow of its former self. The end!
Fortunately, Lemmy just launched the ability for every individual to block instances they don’t like.
I think people should know those are just mutes
its like that on mastodon too, user domain blocks won’t actually protect you from harassment or your data being vacuumed
Still, if people don’t interact with Threads content, that effectively keeps them separate.
Also, come to think of it, what’s keeping companies from “vacuuming” everyone’s data without actually having a public instance that has users interacting with posts on other instances? Example: Instance A exists. What’s stopping a company that runs Instance B, which doesn’t have any active users on it, from taking all the available data from Instance A? Genuine question, by the way. I haven’t exactly kept up with the technical workings of Lemmy very well.
I have the same question. Lemmy and Mastodon are both public and as of yet, no one was able to tell me what “privacy” actually looks like for data in that context. Other than the fact that Meta will destroy it. It’s public, anyone can access it already.
that is not true, at least in mastodon’s case. Mastodon has unlisted, followers only and direct messages those are visible for the instance admins if your account federates to them. That is concerning. I don’t need Zuck to suck up my private posts
While that’s true, I’m not sure how many people are using Mastodon that way and if that’s actually the main concern. In the end it still is meant to be a public platform. Not on the same level of “private messages and photos” where most people would probably be very concerned.
Seems like there’s already accounts that repost content in an interactable way.
Oh thank god, I’m so sick of blocking furry communities. Damned things multiply like rabbits.
Lemmy just launched it in v0.19 yesterday, so you’ll have to wait for the people running your instance (in your case, the Beehaw mods) to update it. Looks like Beehaw is still running v0.18.4.
So many furries are techies so not really surprised.
Yeah, and to be fair, I have no problem with folks being what makes them happy. But the, uhh… enthusiasm makes it hard to avoid.
I see we’ve hit the first E: Embrace. I’m betting it’ll only be a few months until they’re Extending the protocol. Any wagers on how long until we hit Extinguish? 3 years maybe?
It will depend on how many instances will join the extensions…
I think 3 years is probably about right. I don’t think their modus operandi is quite a classic Microsoft style Embrace/Extend/Extinguish, probably just Embrace/Extinguish, the Extend isn’t really necessary. The point is to leverage an open protocol to build a walled garden; embrace early on so your early adopters have content to interact with from the rest of the community, overcoming network effects of the fediverse having more content than them, and then extinguish once they have critical mass to pull the ladder up and leverage network effects against the fediverse. We’ve seen this happen before with Facebook Chat and XMPP; it took 5 years with XMPP (embrace Feb 2010, extinguish April 2015). Network effects might be slightly greater with chat than with fediverse content, so discounting below 5 years is probably sensible (although it depends on how well fediverse does, and their success of cross-promoting it from Instagram and Facebook to get critical mass).
I have no interest in interacting with Threads myself, but I suppose it’s good news for people who want to be on the fediverse but just can’t manage going without being able to follow @burgerking@threads.net or whatever.
I think this will beneficial for the fediverse overall. Thereads will eventually have to advertise. At which point hopefully other Platforms on the fediverse will become more attractive to some threads users.
Absolutely not, federating with Threads is the first step in the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish process that businesses have used in the past to kill things like the fediverse. This is a win for businesses that want to see the fediverse dead and buried
The wrong kind of users though… The people on Facebook likely to use Threads, are the ones who I’d hate to federate with. Discussions would quickly change to low effort karma grabs and inside jokes.
You’re also likely to get a lot more people doing stealth/viral marketing, more bots, etc
That’s why I use Beehaw honestly… It actually feels like I’m talking to people
Exactly! Look at how well XMPP/Jabber is doing after FB and Google embraced it.
The Wig punched himself through a couple of African backwaters and felt like a shark cruising a swimming pool thick with caviar. Not that any one of those tasty tiny eggs amounted to much, but you could just open wide and scoop, and it was easy and filling and it added up. The Wig worked the Africans for a week, incidentally bringing about the collapse of at least three governments and causing untold human suffering. At the end of his week, fat with the cream of several million laughably tiny bank accounts, he retired. As he was going out, the locusts were coming in; other people had gotten the African idea.
- Count Zero - William Gibson
They just need the data. It’s available, all they need to do is open wide and scoop.
Maybe I’m not getting something here, but neither Mastodon nor Lemmy are private, you can find everything open for everyone already, so how would federation change something there? Federation doesn’t mean everyone would use their app, so they wouldn’t gain any app usage analytics.
Also I don’t get how your metaphor make sense. The amount of fediverse users is a rounding error next to threads, instagram, WhatsApp and facebook. So there’s not a “lot a tiny things that can add up”, only a small amount of tiny things which don’t really add up to anything.
We’re pretty much agreeing here. I don’t think them federating out makes much of a difference. They get the data from the reverse for free. They only have to scoop, and it’s worth almost noting individually.
But that’s their current game. Has been for a long time. Serving one ad is a tiny thing. But they add up.
However, them wanting to federate indicates they see the fediverse as something worth noting and paying attention to, possibly even joining. That’s not nothing.
They either think:
- The fediverse will grow with or without them, and without them it’s a potential threat, due to loss of control
- The fediverse has potential that they want to water and help grow so they can prune it and shape it to become something valuable to them
- They can “try genuinely” to join the fediverse, and elicit a response that maims it
That response can come in many forms.
If they provoke a backlash of defederation (done), that causes devision and argument. They win by shattering the potential threat before it can grow.
If they are allowed to join and become a large voice and eventually be like gmail to email, big enough to have control and provide the filtering people are already (quietly, carefully) asking for. All they need to do is to offer “spam filters” and a “personal feed” and we have Facebook 2.0 and they don’t even have to foot most of the server bills.
I’m not sure how to win this, but there’s a lot of ways to lose it.
If they are allowed to join and become a large voice and eventually be like gmail to email, big enough to have control and provide the filtering people are already (quietly, carefully) asking for. All they need to do is to offer “spam filters” and a “personal feed” and we have Facebook 2.0 and they don’t even have to foot most of the server bills.
I think this is inevitable, in part because serving is expensive, and now that we might get significant spammer activity, complicated. Carrying the analogy on, though, I have a Proton account and I can give it out in real life just the way I would a Gmail account. There is no such possibility with Twitter. They could try and put up a hard wall once they have enough buy-in, but that didn’t work so well for Yahoo mail, and hopefully it wouldn’t for Threads.
So yeah, I expect I’ll be on a little instance somewhere, and I’ll still be able to participate in the equivalent of the Obama AMA hosted on one of the big ones.
Sry, I‘m still not following. I don’t understand your argument, are you saying they want to federate to gain additional users to grab data from? Because I don’t think that’s going to be a significant amount of people.
Most people don’t care about what makes the fediverse desirable to its current users, all it does is add friction to them and therefore I don’t see it growing much either.
I think the reason why meta wants to federate is this:
- it helps with anticompetitive arguments, because it’s “open” and not controlled by meta alone
- some will refuse to use anything from meta, and threads users being able to communicate with them adds value
- it won’t hurt meta, because the majority will be using their app anyways
- it helps their image
I don’t think they’re doing it to “get more data” or to “take over the fediverse”. There’s nothing worth taking over and they can probably get the data anyways, it’s all openly available. So it’s basically all upside and no downside for them.
What happens if you merge the user base of a small network and a huge network? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect Will the small network gain from the huge one or the other way round? Also there is a lot to gain. The users base of the fediverse and it’s infrastructure grew by 5x in the last two years: https://fedidb.org/ Meta has a big interest in extinguishing a competitor before it profits from the bandwagon effect.
Active users went down, though. I don’t think mastodon is a big competitor for Meta, Twitter and TikTok are.
If they thought the fediverse was insignificant they wouldn’t even bother. Them spending publicly visible time and energy on it means there’s something for them to gain.
But yeah, I’m not entirely sure what yet. Like you said, reading data is freely available, so it’s not just that.
