I am actually looking forward to threads taking off. I, as a mastodon user, will be able to follow my friends, celebrities, artists and interact with them when federation is activated. It is hard to get friends on to mastodon. The software is great and is better than Twitter, but the people are not on Mastodon but on Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Now, I know platforms by Meta (Facebook) are terrible and spy and leech out pretty much all the data from users. I am also aware that Meta has some hidden agenda behind the launch of threads. Yes, I also read about EEE(Embrace, Extend and Extinguish). Even if Threads decides to drop federation/activitypub, I don’t think the fediverse will be harmed. I quote the founder of Mastodon
There are comparisons to be made between Meta adopting ActivityPub for its new social media platform and Meta adopting XMPP for its Messenger service a decade ago. There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
I think many instance admins are all ready to defederate with threads. It just doesn’t feel right. Imo, we should welcome users from threads and see how it goes.
What are your thoughts?
will be able to follow my friends, celebrities, artists and interact with them when federation is activated
Yea and then they’ll either defederate, or purposefuly break some interoperability functions. But since “everyone” will be on Threads anyway, you’ll just move there too.
It’s happened before even with Meta itself. Their messenger was xmpp compatible. Oculus didn’t need a fucking Facebook account.
You can say that everything will just get back to how it’s now, but it won’t. Right now, Fediverse has momentum. Twitter and Reddit are imploding. People have reason to pay attention, and potentially move or expand their online presence here.
Once Threads has a billion users and they cut the rest off, who will care about some tiny competitor? How many Instagram alternatives are you aware of?
I don’t know why it’s so controversial to keep cancer away in the first place, and not wait until it spreads and kill you.
I think you’d let a polar bear into your house to see how it goes, given the chance.
The whole point of ActivityPub is so this kind of thing can happen, isn’t it?
It assumes everyone wants to play by the rules literally and spirit. Meta won’t do that.
What does this mean? What rules are you referencing?
I, as a mastodon user, will be able to follow my friends, celebrities, artists and interact with them when federation is activated
This is exactly what’s scary. You might wanna check out this blog post about Google and XMPP, which is another federated protocol. Google Talk used to support XMPP, to the point that so much of the XMPP user base were Google Talk users. Then, Google Talk started implementing Google Talk specific features that other XMPP clients did not support. Yes, it made Google Talk more feature rich, but it then made regular XMPP users out of the loop. Then, the final nail in the coffin was Google Talk dropping XMPP support. Suddenly everybody’s friends who were using XMPP to communicate just… went offline as far as GT users were concerned. Then of course, Google killed Google Talk. This is EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) in a nutshell, and any time corporate interests enter projects like this, you’re at risk of this happening.
Don’t get me wrong, the fediverse could use some upgrades, more resources, more users. But I just don’t trust Meta to have the fediverse’s best interests at heart in the way. They’re a corporation, one of the biggest in the world, and they’ll only ever care about what benefits Meta.
There is a whole lot of, “the leopards won’t eat MY face” in here.
It’s astounding how so many will invite the thief at the door inside and offer him supper.
I think it’s ingorantly optimistic to think meta hasn’t spent more money than you make in a lifetime on strategy alone to marginalize the rest of the fedi-verse in an attempt to increase profit and destroy competitors. If you think Mastodon can figh that on donations bless your heart.
I think that activityPub is different from what happened with XMPP. XMPP was a niche product at that time so after Google stepped out, only a disrupted niche reamined.
Here we are a lot of users on our own. If meta starts to do their own implementations of features too difficult to replicate (EEE) or they decide to stop using activityPub, we’ll be fine on our own again.
Anyway, https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
The Fediverse is a niche product too, frankly.
And the disruption is the problem. The whole point of EEE is to choke growth of competition.
How is ActivityPub and the Fediverse insulated from this?
I understand a lot of people are mad at me for posting this. I just wanted to share my thoughts. That is all.
Don’t worry. The fediverse has its circlejerk on one opinion. It is not so different to reddit.
My thinking is, if the normies weren’t motivated enough to move to Mastodon after Musk’s shenanigans, this isn’t going to move the needle very much, either.
To them, they see it as “hey, they’re making something that’s kind of like Twitter, but I don’t have to create a new login, GREAT,” and not look into it any further. I can see a very marginal percentage that could be curious, but not enough to be that noticeable.
If more normies actually cared at all about protecting their data, it’d be a different story.
I honestly agree, I feel so annoyed that on a platform designed from the ground up to enable communication whatever platform we’re on, people are taking the first opportunity to cripple its growth because they hate a company.
You can get whatever data is available from federation with a server just by joining a server - the data they want is from installing their app on your phone.
if you stay federated with them you can get all their content for free without installing their spyware.
complete win.
I don’t think any fediverse user is concerned about their data being taken. The concern comes from the obvious threat of embrace-extend-extinguish.
Meta’s intent is irrelevant; EEE is basically a given of a large corporation because it helps maximise profit.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
this makes a lot more sense. I’ll read the link, thank you
edit: yeah, that’s a bigger risk. I’m a bit more torn… I’m frustrated, the promise of an open protocol is having access to the content without signing up to mainstream services. I would really love that and it’s what the protocol was designed for. cutting ourselves off feels like it’s just going to doom the whole idea to being underused and fringe.
do you think xmpp would have done far better without google?
It definitely would have done better. It not necessarily would be the current big thing, but would have way more usage and versatility now.
If I wanted FB content, I’d join FB. Same goes for Twitter, IG, Tiktok, etc. Do people really think Meta is out to kill Twitter? I think it’s more to use ActivityPub to get data from people who do not use (or rarely use) their services.
And no, they don’t need you to install their app. That’s just a bonus. Why do you think they haven’t included the EU yet?
but… the whole point of the protocol is to allow interoperability? someone went out and worked so hard on an open protocol and your response is that you’d rather just have a different account on every service? way to trash their work.
I believe they aren’t releasing in EU because EU has stronger privacy legislation and their application spys on you.
and yes, there is a huge difference between what they get through the protocol (literally only what you choose to make public) and the data they seek to harvest from having you log into their servers and install their app - actually that’s another big one. browser tracking.
I don’t want to log into their sites because of browser fingerprinting. they want to track everything we do online.
remember when the person who started WhatsApp said that even with e2e encryption on the messages, no one should ever use WhatsApp since meta bought it?
but if you log into a Lemmy server they don’t get browser fingerprinting through activity pub. they can’t see personal messages or track social networks outside of the users directly on their service.
and the opportunity is, people will be exposed to the possibility of using open source and private instances. we just have to make it good and they’ll switch. more and more people are hearing about it with all the other social media fuckups.
You can give all your data to meta, thats your prerogative. And you are ignoring what has happened historically when “open protocols” are engaged with my huge corporations.
Actually, after reading that Threads already has liek 10M users and even some bigger creators joining, I decided to just remove threads.net from my blocked instances list. When threads comes to europe, I’m pretty sure most people will switch to it from Twitter and this means most of my friends and creators I like will also be there and I can just follow them through my instance
Whoa, the amount of downvotes is staggering. I agree with you that it doesn’t feel right to see many instance admins defederates with thread from the start. EEE is a threat, but fediverse is already has known by normies as mastodon and has strong culture behind it. I think fediverse will live as usual even when meta decided to stop federating.
My concern here is that culture will not likely remain unchanged post-Meta, and while change is inevitable, the change imposed by Meta is one that I don’t welcome.
I am on Akkoma for my microblogging and Lemmy for link aggregation. I’ve made some incredible friends over the past year, and participate in communities that I very much value. Even through the waves of joiners off Twitter’s and Reddit’s exoduses, there was still enough cultural intertia to where new people could see “this is the standard of conduct”. Of course, there are no monoliths, so people go off to wherever they’re comfortable and the instance rules align with their values.
The concern is that Threads, as of now, is isolated from the rest of the Fediverse, but is building and transferring it’s culture from already existing social media. Specifically the thing I came to the fediverse to escape, as did many others.
At some point, it’s expected that Meta will enable federation for Threads. For the rest of the Fediverse, it’ll be drinking from the metaphorical firehose. There will have been this culture that was built and backed by Meta, and for those people there will be no change other than the gates being open. They won’t have learned to use content warnings/headings, they won’t have learned how to interact with other servers, the etiquette just likely won’t be there, and why should they adapt to what the rest of the Fediverse is doing? They don’t value it in the same way we do.
This is ultimately why I don’t want Meta here. The protocol and involvement because of what will be their massive weight will be at risk absolutely - this is the thing everyone is talking about with EEE. But even if the protocol survives, the culture likely won’t. Even if I defederate with Threads, which I have proactively, it will have a ripple effect in how new joiners interact with the existing system. It’ll be overwhelming, and everyone will feel that presence, even indirectly.
Fediverse was built to be a break from algorithmic social media and the corporate owned negative-engagement-drives-views doom scrolling culture. Some people might want to follow celebrities and have viral content pushed to them. But that’s not why I’m here, and I worry that even with the choices that I can make as an owner of my own instances that Meta’s involvement will send me looking again for a new safe space.
I came here to escape Twitter, Facebook, et al. I’m not about to welcome them to the table.
At some point, it’s expected that Meta will enable federation for Threads. For the rest of the Fediverse, it’ll be drinking from the metaphorical firehose. There will have been this culture that was built and backed by Meta, and for those people there will be no change other than the gates being open. They won’t have learned to use content warnings/headings, they won’t have learned how to interact with other servers, the etiquette just likely won’t be there, and why should they adapt to what the rest of the Fediverse is doing? They don’t value it in the same way we do.
A valid concern that I missed, thanks for bringing this up.
Hmm… I am very conflicted on this matter, I want fediverse to prosper and replace mainstream social media. But on the other hand I also want fediverse to keep its chill and relaxed community that I can hang around. I also don’t want for fediverse to become toxic because disagreement on how to treat meta. I saw some admins gets harrased just because they plan to federate with meta. It saddens me and I worried that many instance will dissapear because admins can’t stand with that kind of harrasment then proceed to shutdown their instance like mastodon.online ones.
The fediverse is overreacting in a hysterical manner with the Meta federation. Unlike the https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html article suggests, XMPP is a bad comparison, because the protocol itself was destined to fail, to quote tapoxi:
I was a weird XMPP nerd in high school and tried to switch friends from AIM. So here’s my experience.
- Onboarding was difficult. There was no obvious choice of server or client to use.
- Adding friends was difficult. You needed to send a subscription request to a contact, and they needed to send one to you. If anything happened during this process, you couldn’t chat.
- Popular XMPP clients, like Pidgin, also supported the other chat services (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc) so people just continued using those.
- Network effect. You need to convince a mass of people its better, otherwise nobody’s using it because no-one uses it.
- No obvious benefit to the user. It’s decentralized sure, but there weren’t many improvements over AIM that people actually used.
- A lack of good iPhone XMPP clients`
It also struggled with proper handling of multi-device setups with synchronization. There is a reason why XMPP is gone and we have WebRTC, Matrix and others instead, even on the open source side of things.
And the Microsoft Office analogy does not hold up, its data format pretends it is open, it is no open software anyways.
Mastodon made it clear they will not accept venture capital, the corporations cannot highjack the development of Mastodon. If anything we will see forks like the Star Office, Open Office and Libre Office situation in the far future.
I also would like to keep communication channels open to most other instances and networks and will leave those anti corporation blockers. You are not going to tell me with whom I may interact. Keep the invasiveness to a minimum to not flood the network with hateful crap. People looking for designated safe spaces with limited scale communities have otherwise brilliant opportunity to do so.
It is totally wild how people think an instance could be possibly toxic and apply that to Meta, and Meta alone. The entire fediverse must be distrustful, because anyone can hookup. With the recent growth I see more and more drama of immature instance admins throwing tantrums who their users are allowed to interact with, because of some astrological misalignment as with the mastodon.art drama. As an instance admin, you have the role of an ISP, you are not a community mod. Know your place.
lemmy.world itself is the “Meta” of the Threadiverse thanks to its gigantic size alone, speaking of EEE. There is already a “rogue” fediverse in the form of the right wing gab.ai etc.
We will end up with about a dozen huge instances and the rest will have barely any relevance as with E-Mail providers. But it will be still diverse and big enough that EEE is not going to happen.
Eugen is off his meds. He’s content for Mastodon (and all other ActivityPub peers) to stay niche apparently.
Strongly disagree. Every one is going to join us In the fediverse he understands this. Why don’t you?
If you can’t distinguish peers like Kbin, Lemmy and Mastodon from the likes of Meta or Alphabet, I can’t help you.
This is an open federation anyone can join us. Even people we don’t like. We have the tools to handle this in the open software.
The amount of crying about threads is just ridiculous. We have a wonderful open future ahead of us. We have to learn to deal with everyone joining us. That is how great this open system is.
