I look forward to reading everyone’s calm and measured reactions
My primary concern is that they appear to be allowing Thread content to be pulled into other Fedi clients, but not the inverse. So Threads content on Mastodon, but no Mastodon content on Threads. That’s not super great for Mastodon exposure.
Also, given the vast differences in daily active users, wouldn’t Mastodon become flooded, and eventually dependent, on Threads content?
You know what, I was very confused why they would add Fedi integration but unidirectional integration makes a ton of sense from a corporate scumbag POV.
Just defederate them and move on.
Jfc sounds like they’re just paving over the community with a giant ad of themselves
Also, given the vast differences in daily active users, wouldn’t Mastodon become flooded, and eventually dependent, on Threads content?
Servers only pull subscribed user content, so it’s not like the option is nothing or The Firehose. Meta can’t push content into the Fediverse.
I think it’s important to note that Meta doesn’t have more power than anyone else here. They’re just a large instance. They have the same forces keeping them honest as anyone else and their size doesn’t change the incentives for mods and admins. Mods don’t have an interest in working for Meta for free. If they’re spending too much of their time moderating that content, Threads will be limited or defederated.
Given Meta’s size and history it’s understandable to be concerned. At the end of the day though, they’ll either play nice or get bounced. I think we’ll be fine either way.
What about clients that have discovery feeds for content you might not be subbed to? Would that be a problem?
That’s a good question. I don’t know. My guess is that you could be exposed to Threads content you don’t want in the same way you could be exposed to Mastodon content you don’t want. I can’t imagine they’re not set up to respect blocks, mutes, or server suspensions though, right? They have a way bigger problem than Threads if they don’t.
What do you mean discovery feeds? Like the federated/all tab?
Because those feeds only show posts that the instance knows about, which is (mostly) posts from people that at least one person on your instance followed.
If you check the all tab on a small instance, it’s a lot quieter than it is on something like mastodon.social.
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I personally remain neutral on this. The issue you point out is definitely a problem, but Threads is just now testing this, so I think it’s too early to tell. Same with embrace, extend, extinguish concerns. People should be vigilant of the risks, and prepared, but we’re still mostly in wait and see land. On the other hand, threads could be a boon for the fidiverse and help to make it the main way social media works in five years time. We just don’t know yet.
There are just always a lot of “the sky is falling” takes about Threads that I think are overblown and reactionary
Just to be extra controversial, I’m actually coming around on Meta as a company a bit. They absolutely were evil, and I don’t fully trust them, but I think they’ve been trying to clean up their image and move in a better direction. I think Meta is genuinely interested in Activitypub and while their intentions are not pure, and are certainly profit driven, I don’t think they have a master plan to destroy the fidiverse. I think they see it in their long term interest for more people to be on the fidiverse so they can more easily compete with TikTok, X, and whatever comes next without the problems of platform lockin and account migration. Also meta is probably the biggest player in open source llm development, so they’ve earned some open source brownie points from me, particularly since I think AI is going to be a big thing and open source development is crucial so we don’t end up ina world where two or three companies control the AGI that everyone else depends on. So my opinion of Meta is evolving past the Cambridge Analytica taste that’s been in my mouth for years.
You had us in the first half, but anyone who thinks theres any part of meta thats trustworthy is either paid off or an idiot. Sorry bud, but thats fresh horseshit flavor thats rinsing the CA taste from your mouth.
Facebook isnt even actually dead yet, youre 4-6 decades too early to even entertain the thought that meta is safe to conditionally trust.
That’s totally fair and I knew that would be controversial. I’m very heavily focused on AI professionally and I give very few shits about social media, so maybe my perspective is a little different. The fact that there is an active open source AI community owes a ton to Meta training and releasing their Llama LLM models as open source. Training LLMs is very hard and very expensive, so Meta is functionally subsidizing the open source AI community, and their role I think is pretty clearly very positive in that they are preventing AI from being entirely controlled by Google and OpenAI/Microsoft. Given the stakes of AI, the positive role Meta has played with open source developers, it’s really hard to be like “yeah but remember CA 7 years ago and what about how Facebook rotted my uncle’s brain!”
All of that said, I’m still not buying a quest, or signing up for any Meta social products, I don’t like or trust them. I just don’t have the rage hardon a lot of people do.
Big difference between “large company tries to undermine its competitors” and “large company is working with people to advance new tech.”
Meta is using open source to try and slow down its 2 biggest enemies in the field who have better funding and resources. That open source benefits the masses is incidental and likely regretful from metas perspective. They just dont have a better option to prevent themselves being left in the dust.
I’m not going to argue Meta doesn’t have a profit incentive here, but if they just wanted to slow down their rivals they could have closed source their model and released their own product using the model, or shared it with a dozen or so promising startups. They gain nothing by open sourcing, but did it anyway. Whatever their motivations, at the end of the day they opened sourced a model, so good for them.
I really dislike being in the position of defending Meta, but the world is not all black and white, there are no good guys and bad guys. Meta is capable of doing good things, and maybe overtime they’ll build a positive reputation. I honestly think they are tired of being the shitty evil company that everyone hates, who is best known for a shitty product nobody but boomers uses, and have been searching for years now for a path forward. I think threads, including Activitypub, and Llama are evidence that their exploring a different direction. Will they live up to their commitments on both Activitypub and open source, I don’t know, and I think it’s totally fair to be skeptical, but I’m willing to keep an open mind and acknowledge when they do good things and move in the right direction.
Im also sure they are sick of their reputation.
I just dont see how open sourcing a new type of tech that is riddled with ethical issues over intellectual property rights and content replacement in a way that doesnt actually really address those ethical questions has done anything to change their reputation.
Id love to see them move in a right direction. But I dont think chasing the heels of their competitors swinging a bolas in the hopes of catching a dropped lunch is the right direction.
(And if you dont wanna keep arguing it 100% fair, but they definitely benefit from open sourcing their work.)
Ok, so hold the fuck up for a second - most of what you said makes sense, but then you anthropomorphised a massive company that has more influence on global politics than most governments, and could be fairly blamed for mental health issues globally
Facebook is, and was, evil. They do not have morals, they have metrics. Their metrics have not changed.
They invented doomscrolling, intentionally - this wasn’t something they stumbled upon, they did unethical psychological experiments on users.
For example, they shadow banned users. They made it so no one could see their posts, just to see what feelings of isolation would do to engagement… Luckily it didn’t increase engagement. They created invisible echo chambers and artificial controversy, which did work, and is now common practice for social media
Facebook has created some of the greatest open source software in existence. React and pytorch are two that I use frequently. They were first made while the company was actively experimenting with the power to manipulate democracy
Facebook has some of the best engineers, and does a ton of great open source work. They also have some of the most amoral people in positions of authority.
They’re not the same people - the teams who do AI research at Facebook? Great people doing great work
The people who do social media at Facebook? Never trust them. They have a PR problem and are treading lightly.
They want to mine the fediverse for information on users. I don’t think this is an EEE plan… But I think that every time this arm of the company finds themselves in a position of control, they ask “how can we leverage this?”
All great points, maybe my view of Meta as a single entity isn’t a good way to think about them. I wasn’t aware of their open source work outside of LLMs so that is interesting. Your right on with your assessment of what they’ve done in the social media space. I disagree on the point that they want to mine fidiverse user data, just because I don’t think they need to do all this work to integrate threads into activitypub to do that, there are easier ways. But I think your right to be skeptical of Metas intentions.
On the other hand, big companies adopting Activitypub could be a great thing for the fediverse. So risks and benefits. I’ll keep my neutrality for now. But you make a good argument.
Of course they’re doing it to mine user data - their primary business model is to run platforms to collect user data. They then sell user data both directly and by running the second largest targeted ad network.
Their public stance they made when renaming themselves meta is “we found out social networks have a lifecycle, and we want to get ahead of the curve and create/capture the platforms people are moving to”
There’s plenty more to say about Facebook and big companies entering the fediverse but I kinda feel like anyone who is reading this understands the issue to a significant extent
I actually agree with this take.
but is mainstream social media
If they opened as read only then they created API in a most convoluted way possible. If that ridonculous claim is true then I wonder when we see first third party Threads apps.
People on Mastodon are preemptively blocking federation. What can I say 🤷
Just a nice high five for them not falling for corporate embrace and extinguish bullshit when it is in the embrace phase!
Kinda lame. I wonder what site allows it
Me too! Just keep calm and scroll!
Came here to learn whether I’m supposed to like this
Do you like snarky Wendy’s ads?
…kinda?
Well you are not allowed to
Oh. Sorry, I’ll stop.
Well that was civil
And informative!
Over the last week I’ve truly learned the depths of this and my researched conclusion is … no bueno
did you join fediverse to escape big companies
Me, not necessarily. I think it will be a good thing when big companies run fediverse instances too. The point of the fediverse is to have choices whom (including which big company) to trust.
I honestly forgot Threads even existed.
I’m constantly reminded of it by instagram when they insert the most unhinged incendiary thread posts on my feed. Quite a way to advertise. “Hey, do you like to be angry and argue with strangers? Come join Threads!”
“Hey, do you like to be angry and argue with strangers? Come join Threads!”
If anything, this seems like a good reason to leave Instagram.
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I just got into photography and wanted to post some stuff to Flickr. Any idea how pixelfed is for that? I really like being able to sort by camera or lens and seeing the exact settings used right under the pic
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I’ll probably just go for that, if it’s already photography focused that sounds great
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But…my dopamine slot machine…
Considering a significant portion of their userbase adores ragebait, it probably works out quite well for them lol
Didn’t most of the fediverse preemptively de-federate them already?
Mastodon.social, the biggest instance ran by Mastodon devs didn’t and encourages wait and see approach.
I’m on that server and that’s how I feel too.
If it goes poorly, then it can be blocked, but to not try seems silly to me.
And the frog could just jump out of the pot before he boils.
Sure, every other time the water has kept getting hotter and hotter like this it ended up boiling but honestly I really trust the corporations here and I think we should just wait it out! They promised they were just going to slowly heat the water up but not bring it to a boil so I don’t see a reason not to trust them.
Which they do, if you are trying to boil them.
Not in the obvious metaphor I was making.
I’m pointing out the metaphor is false and your argument might as well
The metaphor is clear, and your correction has no bearing on my point whatsoever.
Go be an annoying pedant somewhere else.
the biggest instance ran by Mastodon devs
Did it?
Is there a list of instance somewhere that we can pick from? I thought someone was putting together a list.
https://fedipact.veganism.social/ lists instances with their decision.
I know threads is mastodon oriented, does anyone know if there is a lemmy list as well?
If mastodon federates poorly with Lemmy, I can only imagine that threads will federate even worse with Lemmy.
That’s assuming that Threads (meta) starts federating with all the fediverse, which is a big assumption.
My own opinion, based on nothing, is that they will federate with a few handpicked mastodon instances and block everything else. Mainly due to content moderation.
Mainly due to content moderation.
The ironic part is that the server that I’m on (pawb.fun) is blocking threads not just because of privacy and security concerns but also because Facebook run services have horrible content moderation.
They’re really not one to judge other people’s moderation when they basically do the absolute bare minimum to not be considered an alt-right think tank, and even that’s being pretty generous if you’ve ever seen some of the shit that’s posted on Facebook before.
Re: the privacy concerns. Are those people aware that anyone can see their profile and posts at any time?
That point never made any sense whatsoever.
To see Instances that block threads.net click here
A lot of instances did, the flagship instances run by the Devs of Mastodon didn’t. They think that it’s good and want to encourage it, though at the same time their instances have a spam problem so bad many instances have decided to limit them, making it harder to follow people if your account is on them.
Also noticed that many people say they won’t follow people who are on Mastodon.social or approve follow requests. Which is a bit extreme but I also get it, there’s lots of spambots and not great people on those instances and moderation is slow since they’re so big which doesn’t really help.
some do.
I have a small community masto instance and don’t. If my users want to block the instance, it’s literally 2 clicks and a confirmation away.
Doing to server wide is massively patronizing towards the users
Nah, users can vote and then if they don’t get the vote they want, they can go to another instance.
Users on Mastodon can simply block their domain if they want to.
But can’t Mastodon post on Lemmy and Lemmy can’t block instances on an individual basis? That’s the way I understand it currently stands. I don’t want threads showing up in my feed and would like to block them.
yup. And that’s what we did. The majority of people either didn’t care either way or didn’t want to block it. With way more “don’t block” than “block”. So that’s that. At least for now
How many users are on your instance? I’ve never heard of it.
a little over 20 active users
I see it as just virtue signaling. At the end, we can choose to not join those servers who defederate with them, but I can also think it’s a stupid decision at the same time lol.
You might want to look up what patronize means, in the common phrase “don’t patronize me” it’s used sarcastically.
Essentially, replace the word with “helpful” in your sentence, and you’ll see why it doesn’t fit.
They used it in a perfectly acceptable and understandable way. The definition you’re describing as sarcastic is an official meaning of the word. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/patronize
yeah, I get what you mean. But it’s still mostly fitting in the way I feel about it. Basically: users can think for themselves. They don’t need me to take care of the bit scary world out there.
Doing so for a whole instance feels super condecending. “I know better than you what you want. I’m going to block it”
I get what you meant, which is why I replied, I’m saying that that word means the opposite of what you intended.
To patronize someone is not a bad thing, the word means “to be someone’s customer/patron” and through doing so, supporting and helping them. That’s where patreons name comes from, for example.
In the phrase “don’t patronize me” it’s used sarcastically to say “I know you’re trying to help, but please don’t” but the word doesn’t actually refer to someone who is going over your head to do things for you. It’s actual meaning is 100% positive, and hence confuses what you’re saying. Which is that blocking threads should be done by users because it should be their decision.
Instead, your final sentences literal meaning, paraphrased, is “a server-wide block would be really good and helpful for all my users”.
It might be, but I’ve only ever seen it used in the condecending way. And it seems to be used like this for quite some time
Can’t argue with real-world use, but man that is a semantic shift that is doing the original word dirty.
Apparently patronage and other forms of the word are having their definitions affected, too.
I read a lot of books so I’m definitely a lot more used to how words are used up to several decades ago.
yup. language is weird
Welcome to humanity since the invention of language
I don’t know if it’s perhaps a regional thing but, in the UK, “being patronising” is used pretty much exclusively in the pejorative sense, with a similar meaning to “condescending”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard (in actual conversation) “being patronising” used to mean someone is giving patronage, in fact - we would say someone is “giving patronage” or “is a patron” instead. We also pronounce “patronise” differently, for whatever reason: “patron” is “pay-trun”, “patronage” is “pay-trun-idge” but “patronise” is “pah-trun-ise”.
It seems the pejorative use of the word dates back to at least 1755, too, so it’s not exactly a new development.
in the UK, “being patronising” is used pretty much exclusively in the pejorative sense, with a similar meaning to “condescending”
It’s the same in the US, and has been ever since I can remember. No idea where this person lives that the positive meaning would be the first thing they’d think of.
What about patronising as in ‘patronising this business’? A little archaic, but I do hear it from time to time, usually with the ‘pay’ pronounciation.
Then again, if someone is accusing me of being patronising (which happens a lot for reasons I don’t quite understand, but I digress), it’s split odds whether I’m “pah-trun-ising” or “pay-trun-ising”.
English is weird (perhaps this is its wyrd?)
What if they’re also using it sarcastically
They might be, but that’s generally a bad idea online (without using /s), someone like me who can’t hear their tone of voice could come along :D
Hi everyone, I am collecting preemptive pikachu faces for when meta inevitably attempts to screw the fediverse over. Please put them in replies to this comment so we don’t clutter up the rest of the comments.
- 1999, XMPP is born. 👶
- 2005, Google launches “Talk”, touted as a “great victory for XMPP”, with “large-scale XMPP services”.
- 2012, Google encourages “Talk” users to switch to “Hangouts”.
- 2013, Google drops open XMPP interoperability with other servers.
- 2015, Google begins shutting down “Talk” clients.
- 2017, previous phase is now complete, XMPP is virtually unheard of.
- 2022, Google shuts down all XMPP integration. XMPP is, for all intents an purposes, dead. 🪦
- 2016, Mastodon is born. 👶
- 2023, Meta launches “Thread”, touted as a great victory for Mastodon. ← You are here.
- 2030, Meta encourages “Thread” users to switch to “Fabric”.
- 2031, Meta drops open ActivityPub interoperability with other servers.
- 2033, Meta begins shutting down “Thread” clients.
- 2035, previous phase is now complete, Mastoson is virtually unheard of.
- 2040, Meta shuts down all Mastodon integration. Mastodon is, for all intents an purposes, dead. 🪦
N.B.: The delays in the timeline were copied over verbatim. Historical conditions have to be taken into account, as the popular adoption of internet began in the late 2000s. So it is likely for the “extinguish” phase of Mastodon to happen much faster. I give it 5 years tops. And by 2030, we will all remember it as we now remember XMPP.
2017, previous phase is now complete, XMPP is virtually unheard of.
So it returned back to a state where it would have been without Google anyway.
All the Jabber clients and services combined were never even close to rivaling ICQ, AIM, MSN, Skype, or whatever else ruled the IM space back then.
So it returned back to a state where it would have been without Google anyway.
The state before Google was “up and coming solution for federated chat”
The state after Google was “impractical solution that does not federate¹ properly, and is hard to set up²”.
Those are not the same.
1: because of Google.
2: because of Google.Users don’t care about federation. For them, there is no such category as “federated chat”. There is only “chat”.
XMPP never had significant market share among the instant messengers of the time (except maybe as custom solutions for work chat, but not as a consumer service).
Yeah, of course it would have not ever been a mainstream thing for end users. But Google definitely nipped them in the bud, both by providing a (bogus) drive behind the XMPP development (and so, preventing anyone else from doing so), and also by kickstarting them into relative widespread use instead of letting them grow organically.
If they had, there is a possibility XMPP would have become a service provided by nerds for their friends and family as soon as 2010, like email, or more recently, nextcloud.
And it would have been a valid option for corporate solutions. But no, instead, we got slack. Thanks, Google.
Same old corporate strategy. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Embrace extend extinguish
Don’t federate with corps, it will only end badly
Hold your ground men, stay on non-corpo socials (here)!
They can’t really do anything they couldn’t already do if we do that.
Please could you tell me what success looks like for ActivityPub if it doesn’t involve adoption?
It’ll look like what we already have. Swaths of users self hosting, with lots of redundancy to deal woth instances that have problems.
And that might mean it needs to stay small, but that’s OK. Not all success is measured in popularity.
Staying free, open, and undriven by this idea of a shareholder that will destroy anything good in the pursuit of profit.
corpo philosophy 101
Pretty cool. I keep saying that this is a win for open standards and Meta probably does this to appease EU regulators. It’s no surprise that this happens as Threads launches In Europe.
Yep, can’t wait to be able to personally defederate from them, I hope that option comes soon.
I see it as an opportunity to tell people on Threads to leave Threads and use an open platform, such as Mastodon, instead. Then eventually Threads will shut down, because everyone moved :D
Won’t they have control over their instance though? I’m sure they’re going to run it like Reddit and shadow ban the shit out of their users and also not let them see certain stuff.
Far more likely to lean on their infrastructure advantage and add things like image and video hosting on-platform that the Fediverse can’t do now.
Then once secured, they can defederate from the actual fediverse and take the whole thing private.
or all of the above.
Ok but we wouldn’t really be losing anyone though, just threads users who wouldn’t have been here anyways
people don’t join because complicated
You mean as instance blocking? Because the Lemmy devs have stated that it’s not going to work the way everybody’s assuming it’s going to work.
So far the way that it’s been laid out it’ll only block communities on that Lemmy Instance, users will not be filtered.
That’s ignoring the fact that Lemmy’s blocking system is already flawed in it’s design and isn’t really an effective tool against malicious users.
So we really shouldn’t treat blocking even of instances as personal defederation, because it isn’t and unless something really changes and Lemmy’s development it never will be. You can on Mastodon because Mastodon’s blocking system is much harsher as well as the fact that federation highly depends on following, but lemmy works much differently and also has a significantly weaker blocking system (I should also add it does not respect mastodon’s blocking system) so because of that being able to block instances should not and cannot be considered an alternative to defederation, especially when it comes to malicious instances.
Why would you want to defederate at all? It’s akin to hiding your head in the sand, except done on a community-wide scale. Just because you can’t see the nazi over there in the bushes doesn’t mean he isn’t squatting there, observing you.
Read this for an idea as to why people are against letting Meta federate: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
It’s not a cut and dry yes or no for me.
I might be looking at this wrong, so please let me know why if I am, but I don’t understand the argument that Google killed XMPP. The protocol existed before Google and still existed after Google. I assume the number of people using the XMPP protocol before Google implemented it was small. Then for a little while, Google added all of their users into the network who could now message all the “pure” XMPP users who were already there. After that though, when Google left the protocol and took all its users that weren’t using XMPP before then anyway, how did that kill it? Would you not still have the same group of XMPP users who were there before Google? Anyone you could chat with before you could still chat with now.
XMPP was very popular. Google joined it, and with it, the power to give it’s users on Gmail access to all the other chat products that all had more chat users by sharing the same XMPP space. Users were very happy to use the superior Gmail product and also let go of their old chat tools because they could still talk to everyone just fine!
Google waited until they had most of the users and simply started making non compatible changes to their chat until they finally defederated themselves and suddenly their users could no longer chat with anyone who wasn’t also on Google.
People noticed, but most of the users were no longer willing to drop their now-familiar gchat client because they were now used to it. Users like me who wanted to use Pidgin still were suddenly unable to chat with 80% of their friends unless they gave in and opened up gchat too.
If Google never federated with the system, we might still likely have aim, msn, etc still around focusing on their chat users. But Google did their thing, stole the market and we’re where we’re at now. Ironically, most people I know now disable Google chat because Google has tried really hard to ruin something that was just fine. But no one is installing Pidgin again and have mostly moved to Discord and Slack (at least in my circles).
is facebook
why wouldn’t you want to defederate
bc there’s people on the other side :)
Obviously we will have to see what sort of content comes in from Threads, but knowing Meta, they will be serving a lot of ads in it. So instances will effectively be distributing Meta ads for free. Well free for Meta; the instances will incur additional costs.
He already is, this is all open? They will include people’s numbers in their “awesome wave of the future” and I don’t want that. The more people ignore them and isolate them, the more they won’t have power over everyone.
What are “people’s numbers”? What power would they have if we didn’t defederate?
Dude, facebook is evil, we all know that. I have no idea how they plan to take over the fediverse, but they’re planning it. Do you remember when they first announced and then everyone suddenly started calling it the threadiverse? They have plans, hold on to your seat.
I’ve been under the impression people started using the term threadiverse to describe the Lemmy/Kbin side of the fediverse because we exist in Reddit style threads and interaction with microblog style fediverse posts is obtuse at best. We’re practically in a separate bubble over here, and that was the cause of the new term.
Edit: The first time I saw the term used was when FediDB made a page for tracking Lemmy+Kbin users
Edit 2: Archive.org link to the Threadiverse page from June 15th, half a month before the Threads name leaked.
I hadn’t heard it once until threads started up. I didn’t join until the great migration, so maybe earlier people used it, but I had only seen fediverse to describe it.
What is the worse case scenario for me, a person living on kbin? What the heck could they do to ever possibly affect us when we can just pull the plug on them anytime?
by user @OtakuAltair@lemm.ee
If there’s one company you should preemptively block, it’s Facebook. They have a track record of destroying anything and everything they touch and there is zero reason to think it won’t be the same this time. From this post:
They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
will damage be permanent
they have more influence
It’s like blocking e-mails from Google. People can’t take a win.
To be honest, not a great argument, considering that the hidden magic that Google and a handful of big players do, specifically in relation to spam, is what made emails substantially an oligopoly. Today if you want to run an email server, you need to jump 20 hoops to hope your email will ever reach the mailbox of someone on Gmail. Emails were supposed to be a distributed protocol too…
How does defederating prevent that from happening anyway?
No really relevant for my point, but I assume that preventing them to be effectively part of the fediverse, can reduce the blast radius of their changes, since they will be (more) isolated.
If they are on the other hand fully part of the fediverse (I.e. nobody defederates them) many people may be incentivised to move to “that instance” because it will realistically have better availability and in the future might have more “features”, which is exactly the kind of extensions to the protocol that other won’t be able to keep up with.
I personally used to care more in the past, I don’t now that much, but I can definitely see the potential danger.
The whole argument is that Meta will do whatever they want with their implementation of Activity Pub and lacks any further details. Blast radius of what? How does that affect existing Mastodon instances? Do they lose anything compared to what they have now?
Threads doesn’t need Mastodon users because it has orders of magnitude more already. Mastodon has unique competitive advantage, for example no ads, that could compel Threads users to switch with little friction. It might turn out that Threads will offer things Mastodon won’t on principle (follower and notification management for huge accounts) which might actually make whole ecosystem more healthy and diverse.
Really, it’s best to see what’s going to happen. I’m optimistic because I think open alternatives are generally better and will win long term.
Agreed. Instances always have the option to defederate with Threads should it prove spammy or ad-filled or socially awful, but I’m cautiously optimistic that Threads will pave the way for a more open social media paradigm in general. Decentralization is a core tenet of Web3, and everyone started focusing on the block chain and Bitcoins and whatnot but there’s so much more to decentralization than that.
Why in the world are you cautiously optimistic? What would give you the idea that meta would do anything but what’s in their shareholder’s interest. My biggest question is, do we know if activitypub is secure enough to keep them out of its software?
I don’t think it’s fair to preemptively assume meta is going to be evil here, where is the evidence?
If a bear was charging you that you had just watched murder a bunch of people would you just assume it was going to attack you? What evidence would you have for that?
Personally, I think large tech corporations have a wonderful track record with treating the public commons as a shared resource to nurture and maintain not a coal vein in the ground to ruthlessly extract :)
How convenient, I just posted this, lol.
https://wedistribute.org/2023/08/threads-new-terms-affects-the-fediverse/
Though this is more federation with a wheel and spoke model than true decentralization where each pier communicates with other piers directly. Each have their place for sure, but they cannot be interchanged because they are not the same thing.
Pretty cool at first glance. Not so cool when they have pulled in enough users and then remove the federation.
They have orders of magnitude more users than all Mastodon instances combined already.
Part of that is only because any and all Instagram accounts are also considered Threads accounts. I have a feeling active users is probably in a similar ballpark
BS. There are 140 mil Threads accounts and over 2 bil Instagram accounts. You can create Threads account with Instagram and for a time they couldn’t be decouple but that changed too.
I’m looking forward to federation. My stance on it is that I don’t want to use Threads, but I want to follow and interact with the people who do. Best of both worlds like this.
no
I wouldn’t be too worried about Threads joining the fediverse.
They had the perfect opportunity to dethrone X with a superior app but have given users the most barebones piece of shit that doesn’t even have support for hashtags or trending topics.
Mastodon has this functionality.
Last time I booted up Threads, my feed was flooded with e-girls posting twerking videos. I don’t follow any such accounts on Threads nor Instagram and I don’t like it when my social media feels like a softcore porn platform.
it’s also doing a lot better than Mastodon because they integrated it with Instagram
I wish they wouldn’t. Stay a walled garden.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think this is actually a great thing for Mastodon. The truth is the majority of people are just never going to sign up for a Mastodon server as they stand today. The majority of people want algorithmic feeds run by a central entity. I know the people here don’t want that, but that’s what the majority of people do want. Will I use Threads? No but if this breathes more life into Mastodon and exposes more people to the concept then that is a good thing. Being able to use a client of your choice to interact with people on something like Threads is also a very good thing. The alternative is a completely closed social network like Twitter.
I know, I know “embrace, extend, extinguish”, but literally this is the best that we can hope for unfortunately. The alternative is everyone goes and uses a closed system.
Google the history of xmpp. This is exactly the same.
It’s not a good thing.
So we can let Mastodon die on the vine or chance it dying? Ok, I know my choice.
It’s not like the majority of people are already on open protocols. I’m sure Threads dwarfs Masrodon usage just as Twitter and possibly even BlueSky.
IF Mastodon was dominate I might have a different view but it’s not. If Threads federates then there is an opportunity to push people to other clients which make switching to a Mastodon/ActivityPub server much easier. That’s literally only upside. It’s not like the people on Mastodon now are going to leave it for Threads.
They might end up being forced to, should Threads decide to revert.
Mastodon users will inevitably hook up on Threads communities instead of fostering their own, and at that point being left to their own devices would be a catastrophe.
And yes, this is exactly what happened to xmpp.
What is the obsession with numbers? Centralization mentality is the problem. The idea that unless 5 Billion people are on a network will it be “successful” denies the joys of effective and sustainable networks. I really honestly wouldn’t want to see a fediverse server with more than 100K daily active users. I would rather have 10 instances of 10K active users.
Meta and those billionaire centrists can go fuck themselves.
I wouldn’t call it an obsession, but there does need to be a critical mass of users before a social networks become useful.
I simply don’t trust meta, they have incredibly bad precedent.
I’m not sure. Might be a great thing, but Facebook might equally be the equivalent of a whale landing in a small pond, killing everything else in the process.
I was here when EEE started!
I don’t see the issue. For all those concerned about privacy: you know you are posting in public space? Anyone can scrape the posts however they want. Which is a key aspect of openness btw.
On the other hand, by leaving Threads in would show other companies the concept of a global community instead of multple closed groups. The companies could save on moderation costs Reddit-Style that way, but open.
You need to learn your Internet history. It wasn’t so long ago that we had a diverse, interoperable community of instant messaging platforms based on XMPP, an open, federated protocol. Anybody could host their own XMPP server, and communicate with any other XMPP server. Then in 2006, Google added XMPP support to their Talk app and integrated it into the Gmail web interface. But there were problems:
First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing. They were not implementing everything. This forced XMPP development to be slowed down, to adapt. Nice new features were not implemented or not used in XMPP clients because they were not compatible with Google Talk (avatars took an awful long time to come to XMPP). Federation was sometimes broken: for hours or days, there would not be communications possible between Google and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers, posting irregularities and downtime (I did it several times, which is probably what prompted the job offer).
And because there were far more Google talk users than “true XMPP” users, there was little room for “not caring about Google talk users”. Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.
Only a few years later, Google would discontinue Google Talk, migrated all their users to Hangouts, and decimated the XMPP community in an instant. Most of the Google users never noticed, outside of some invalid contacts in their list.
That’s why everyone distrusts Meta. Even with Threads being a relatively unsuccessful platform by commercial social media standards, its active userbase still dwarfs the entire Fediverse combined. There’s absolutely nothing stopping Meta from running the exact same playbook:
-
Add ActivityPub support, but only partially
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Add new features to ActivityPub without consulting with the rest of the Fediverse or documenting the extensions, degrading the experience for everyone not using Threads
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Entice Fediverse users to migrate to Threads–after all, why use Mastodon or Lemmy when 95%+ of ActivityPub traffic originates from Threads?
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Deprecate ActivityPub support after most of the Fediverse is on Threads, leaving it smaller and more fragmented than if Threads had never federated at all, while forcing everyone who migrated from another Fediverse platform to Threads into an impossible choice between abandoning the vast majority of their contacts or subjecting themselves to Meta’s policies, tracking, and moderation
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Meta cant be trusted. Ever.
threads is centralized
If it federates with ActivityPub, it won’t be.
is have all users on one instance
The Threads software will still be centralized, but the network won’t be. It’s a bit like saying outlook.com email is centralized.
141 million users
It’s big, and that’s absolutely a threat from an embrace/extend/extinguish perspective. A big node on a decentralized network is still part of a decentralized network unless they start breaking the decentralization.
big node is still centralized
Ok, so what is actually the main argument people have to preventatively defederate with Threads? I perhaps haven’t thought about it much, but I don’t personally see the problem if my instances would federate with them. I’m mentally comparing this to email. If I ran my own email service, or used someone else’s, why would I want to block Gmail, or icloud, or Hotmail/Outlook?
Of course if they don’t have effective admin/moderation policies and actions then, yeah they should be blocked or limited. The same holds true with email federation.
The owner of the server I’m on wrote a nice post describing his reasoning https://about.scicomm.xyz/doku.php?id=blog:2023:0625_meta_on_the_fediverse_to_block_or_not_to_block
Thanks, that’s actually precisely what I was interested in reading. That admin team totally rocks for motivating their decision with such a comprehensive argument.
That post is outstanding and is a wonderful writeup that highlights the danger of associating with a company as morally bankrupt as Meta.
There is concern that Threads will use embrace, extend, extinguish to depreciate the ActiviyPub protocol. Essentially, they adopt the open standard, expand on it with proprietary additions, then when everyone is using the modified standard they drop support for the open standard and now everyone has to play ball by their rules.
I’m also worried that due to content moderation policies, Threads might choose to federate only with a few handpicked mastodon instances. Thus provoking a huge increase of users in these instances because they want to interact with people on threads and causing a centralisation issue, because people will start joining this instances far more than the others.
It would also render useless self hosting a single user instance for yourself.
Ah, yes that is a fair enough concern. Thanks. There are lessons in the fate of XMPP (and HTML with IE I guess?). However ActivityPub seems to have so much more momentum than XMPP ever had. This makes me more optimistic about Fedi.
Also, unlike with messaging which is much more dependent on a small number of people you interact with, I think microblogging is much more personal. If Threads would join, grow big, and then defederate 5 years later I may miss out on following some people but that still wouldn’t make me leave Mastodon. I left Twitter after all.
Still, it’s a reasonable and interesting concern.
Is it so much of a problem if the rest of the fediverse doesn’t follow suit. Most of us and the original devs are here because we don’t like mainstream social media and the direction it’s going.
So sure threads can show up and start trying to call the shots, but I think if we only except them if what they do is in our best interest it will be fine as we can just break off again and do our own thing if they start trying to head the project in their own direction.
As I don’t think most people on here care whether threads is part of the fediverse or not.
My point is they only have power if we go with what they want, and due to the open source nature of this just because they have money and a lot of employees doesn’t mean they can take control.
The content on threads are utter garbage. I have tried to get on with it but it doesn’t seem to work out for me.
I think the issue is that on most people’s feeds, the vast, vast majority of the content that they see would be from the
@threads“instance.” Think of how salty people get about the size of mastodon.social or lemmy.world are compared to other instances, and multiply that along with the threat of a poison pill in the form of corporate embrasure.Culturally, the fedi is pretty anti-corporate, so a lot of members are suspicious of centralization / partnership with corporate entities. Though this lens, I think the objections make total sense.
It’s honestly kind of irrational. The “embrace, extend, extinguish” stuff is on shaky grounds as a framework as it is, but it wasn’t even part of the conversation until people started trying to retroactively justify the knee-jerk rejection to Meta.
So it’s mostly “we should grow the “fediverse” into the new universal social tool. No, not like that”.
But hey, here we are. I’m on the record saying that I’ll mvoe instances if they join to keep them available.
Isn’t the entire point of these platforms and the nature of federation is that they get to decide who they federate with and when, and even why?
Sure. And that the users get to pick their instance based on those decisions.
Which is what I’m saying I’ll do.
Problem with that train of thought is you always land in weird anarchocapitalist loopholes. Ultimately there is a level of communal decisionmaking that ends up happening and needs some degree of organization, even if the alternatives are also supported on the fringes.
I’m not telling you not to pick your instance, but I was countering your claim that what they are doing is irrational. Because if it’s irrational, then the very point of these services is irrational.
I mean, social media sucks. It was a mistake. All of it. This included. So yeah?
But no, a specific choice to defederate can make more or less sense. Not every option is equal. Defederating because some place is too popular and you kinda don’t like that it has a bunch of normies in it and is made by a big social media corpo? Kind of irrational. Defederating because disruptive trolls are harassing your users? Yeah, alright.
FWIW, I’m not even saying that an influx of Meta users wouldn’t be disruptive. I have a strong suspicion that it would show big gaps on moderation and usability around here if you suddenly added a couple of zeros to the userbase. I still don’t think making it a rule that federated services have to be small is the right solution to that.
Democracy is about choice too.
I’d call Trump voters irrational.
By your logic, I couldn’t.
EEE was the first issue folks brought up when threads was announced. It’s always been apart of the conversation.
The conversation doesn’t start there, though. Before Threads was announced everybody was buzzing about how everyone should come over here and they really hoped new services would join ActivityPub and it should become just like email.
Then Threads and BlueSky started suggesting doing just that and it was all “actually, Google kinda EEE’d the crap out of email and RSS and we don’t want those guys here at all”.
So no, EEE wasn’t always part of the converrsation. It was only part of the conversation when the hipstery claim that the cool obscure thing should be for everybody got replaced by the hipstery claim that the cool obscure thing was selling out and should be gatekept to keep it real.
Feels like this is a argument about perspective. We’ll have to agree to disagree.
Fair enough. As long as the different perspectives are represented and the groupthink doesn’t take over I don’t need everybody to agree with me.
what wrong with facebook rejection
With thinking Facebook sucks? Nothing.
With thinking Facebook sucks and Facebook’s audience should stay in Facebook while the “fediverse” stays small and exclusive? That it goes against the stated goals of providing decentralized, open social platforms as a replacement for current closed platforms.
facebook only has one instance
deleted by creator
does mastodon
decentralized
only one instance
pick one
deleted by creator
how is irrational
If true, I would expect this link to work, but it’s 404 at the time of this comment:
I’m surprised @zuck@threads.net isn’t one of those select few accounts.
@Zak@lemmy.world It would make sense for him to be but I guess it might be easier to use accounts that are not so much public knowledge like @mosseri@threads.net rather than the head of META themselves. Really hope if it goes well they will possibly even think about doing the same with there other platforms.
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world @zuck@threads.net @strahlemann@feddit.de
mosseri@threads.net is the head of Instagram and Threads and has 627k followers on Threads, so not exactly low-profile. I have my concerns about Meta’s intent here, but I do hope it goes well.
Less of a public figure than Zuck I was meant to say. I really do hope they have a goodish intent and I’m sure the Fediverse will keep on going with or without META, just really hope to see more of a general audience join us on the Fediverse
Testes nuts.
