As you’ve probably heard, Threads (a fairly new social network from Facebook’s parent company Meta) is testing integration with the fediverse. Depending on how you look at it, it’s a great opportunity, a huge threat, or both!
Back in May and June, when Threads’ first announced their plans, there were quite a few polls on Mastodon about people’s reactions, most showing opinions split roughly equally. How do people feel today?
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Their goal is pretty standard affair.
- Claim to be simply making yourself part of the group for the benefit of everyone. We’re all gonna be friends, this is good for you, you’ll see.
- Use your position and resources to make yourself the defacto way to use the tech. Bonus points of you can make the average person see you and said tech as being one in the same.
- Once you have gathered a high enough percentage of the users, simply make changes or take other actions that will cut yourself off from everywhere else, effectively cutting off those users from anywhere that is not you. Since most of them are already “your” users, barely any of them will even notice anything change, let alone care.
- Repeat previous steps for any new competing service that covers along to threaten you.
isn’t threads already several times larger than the whole of the “fediverse”?
100 millions users of Threads against ~1.5M users of the whole Fedi. It won’t be a toxic relationship for sure.
Meta has a very bad track record, but on the other hand I would be happy to be able to follow famous people that are only on Threads from my privacy-respecting services.
I see Threads federation something like an RSS feed. It’s not inherently bad per se.
For me personally there are two main forces at play here:
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I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don’t use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.
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Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it’s a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.
I don’t really know for sure, but I’d have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty fucking narrow. We’d be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it’d also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it…
So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.
I’m perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I’m willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).
From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.
From a cultural standpoint, I’m also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc… Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase–and that’s the Fediverse working as intended, imo.
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I hope they federate
why do you hope that?
I hate Reddit and Twitter both so I want the Fediverse to take off
Facebook/Threads will not be a good federation partner, same cesspool as Twitter.
I mostly just hate Spez and Elon, so Threads would be cool joining the Fediverse imo. Facebook should stay off tho, there’s nothing worthwhile there
Threads is by Facebook/Instagram though?
Yeah, but they’re separate, so I think they could federate Threads without federating Facebook
is by same people
I don’t like meta as a company.
But I don’t want to exclude a bunch of people just because they decided to use a server owned by meta. It’s not like the server is a community dedicated to hurting people or promoting hate speech or something, and I don’t want to punish people just because they’re not savvy enough to understand the problems with meta. Let them federate and just don’t follow any of them if you’re not interested in any of them.
Defederating isn’t going to benefit us or hurt meta, it’s just gonna hurt the people who use threads.
Your word choice is just bizarre. Nobody would be excluded, they’d only have to make a profile on a different, normal server. And nobody would be “hurt” by not having access to Lemmy’s memes about Linux and similar stuff.
just don’t follow any of them if you’re not interested in any of them
Except that theoretically my “All” feed would still be full of garbage-tier content that people typically expect and post on Meta’s services, and that userbase with its same mindset would eventually spill over into the communities that I do follow too.
Your response isn’t self consistent.
they’d only have to make a profile on a different, normal server my “All” feed would still be full of garbage-tier content that people typically expect and post on Meta’s services
If they make a profile on a normal server then your feed will be full of that same content you don’t want. You’re trying to exclude users, not meta itself.
Besides, you keep taking as though they’re federating with Lemmy. They’re not, they’re federating with mastodon. Having mastodon posts show up automatically in your Lemmy feeds is unusual. Kbin, maybe.
Defederating isn’t going to benefit us or hurt meta, it’s just gonna hurt the people who use threads.
…Good. they should move their happy asses to a normal, non-ghoul of a corporation run mastodon server, if it pains them so.
It is a mastodon server. A mastodon server run by meta. So how exactly is defederation going to benefit you?
Check my edit. And it benefits me by meta can eat a bag of dicks.
this wont cause meta to eat a bag of dicks. it doesn’t actually hurt meta if you defederate with them. if they want to harvest data, they can already do that by standing up their own activitypub server and just subscribing to everything.
not everyone is as technically savvy as we are, or as aware of corporate politics as we are. as much as I think they should be, they arent, and so they use facebook and threads and twitter. I dont think we should exclude them on the sole basis of their ignorance in this particular area.
Most people don’t care about that shit as much as we do. and if a social network doesn’t have a good supply of normies, then it devolves into a circlejerk cesspit real quick.
was no
still is no
the whole point of federation is networks being able to connect to each other. it will hopefully be a matter of course in the future.
is also decentralization
threads have 141 million users ._.
I’m pretty sure they don’t have that many, Threads too, a steep hit:
Meta’s Twitter rival Threads sees steep drop in daily users by 80 per cent, report says
Do you have independent numbers to back up your statement?
is still disproportionate amount
20 million compared to 1.5 million per day isn’t that huge of a jump considering threads probably has a shit ton more bots.
yes is
20 million for only one node
I still feel strongly against it.
I’ll possibly end up leaving the Fediverse and finding a nice forum where I know corpos will never ruin.
I don’t see how it’s a threat. They can’t take over the whole federation.
Sure they can. Like Google took over XMPP.
