When Meta launched their new Twitter competitor Threads on July 5, they said that it would be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon, and all the other decentralized social networks in the fediverse “soon”.
But on July 14, @alexeheath of the Verge reported that Meta’s saying ActivityPub integration’s “a long way out”. Hey wait a second. Make up your mind already!
From the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say “a long way out” is a clear victory for the free fediverse’s cause.
Bummer I honestly can’t wait until we can integrate. Connecting with some who would just never come to the fediverse otherwise
Bummer I honestly can’t wait until we can integrate. Connecting with some who would just never come to the fediverse otherwise
I don’t consider that a victory at all. Meta could bring the Fediverse to the masses. And allow anyone to follow and interact with their friends on Threads.
Why do we need to bring the fediverse to the masses though?
So that…people will use it?
I mean the whole purpose of social media is to interact with others.
Maybe you prefer spending your time interacting with strangers. There was once a time when social media was actually about networking with friends and family and people you otherwise actually knew. That’s why I joined.
Also to get more people AWAY from the tech giants and basically reimagine advertising and business as we know it.
I mean really it’s good for everyone who’s not a conglomerate tech company.
Hm, so you’re giving a new API free of charge to all the AI tech giants in the era of AI. How is this bad for them?
…because people will realize there are better platforms without privacy violations and ads where they can still interact with their friends and transition.
Like Mastodon and others have basically all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks.
Without ads YET. Once the “masses” arrive, donations are no longer an option.
I mean they could try it but people would just migrate to a different server so there would be no point.
The main Mastodon instance has 1.5M users and no ads.
Is 1.5M users “the masses” to you? Reddit has like 400M active users monthly. That’s the scale I’m talking about.
Registered users is a very bad metric too.
Because social media, by definition, only works when “the masses” use it. I don’t just want to interact with the fellow nerds currently on the Fediverse, I want decentralized social media to be the norm.
What is this terrible gatekeeping mentality? We want more content, and we want more people to have freedom. Everyone deserves privacy and decentralization. This gatekeeping is toxic and conservative in nature.
Let’s start with Facebook first, the platform that made a walled garden out of
- messengers (went from XMPP to walled garden)
- websites (businesses having facebook pages rather than freely accessible websites)
- used product markets
- online communities
- email (sending email to a Facebook user is converted into a private message on Facebook rather than sending out the email, at least that was a thing in the past)
- … (insert any Facebook service here)
You can’t trust Facebook, it’s about turning its users into a product for marketers, and that’s it.
Called it. I’d be prepared to bet that in a few more weeks, Meta’s just gonna quietly drop the idea of ActivityPub integration all together. To me at least, it always seemed like the whole “planned Fediverse integration” for Threads was just them trying to jump on what they saw as the latest buzzword bandwagon.
Had Threads been released a few months earlier, you can bet they’d have been talking about “Metaverse integration” instead.
Could definitely see this, plus trying to capitalize on the exodus of users from reddit.
Every “mainstream” (ie: not tech focused) source I have seen discussing threads has been keenly missing the whole federation component and focused on it being a twitter replacement competition.
The whole federation thing is probably too abstract for most.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 a clear victory. It’ll be a few months.
That’s right, as the article says
And from the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.”
Honestly this is why the whole “Meta will kill the fediverse” thing people were saying never really convinced me. They just don’t seem to care, I mean it’s been a month and they still have no real plans to actually federate.
A month isn’t very long, they haven’t even figured out their basic features - this was more a “maybe later this year” timeframe. It could be done quickly if they decided to start by reproducing mastodon and going from there, but building something that federates but is highly monetizable takes time - honestly they were probably pleased by the numbers and decided to go for monetization first
Making it clear they are unwelcome was the point though.
It seems they’ve put the idea on the back burner after we largely made our position clear, but it’s not unlikely that they try to quietly federate down the road… Every time they think about it, we have to make them believe this would be more trouble than it’s worth
I personally believe that Meta never intended Threads to be support Activitypub and just chose it so they could do the bare minimum to comply with the EU digital markets act.
@nave @theneverfox believing is not knowing is speculation is not helping
I mean, this is my area of expertise. Sure, it’s speculation, but it’s educated speculation. I’m intimately familiar with activity pub and the way large projects are brought into existence
Plus, following my recommendation if I’m wrong would at most be a slight amount of wasted effort, but ignoring it if I’m right could be a huge problem.
I’d call that helpful
Given how evil they are, this definitely seems plausible (although threats isn’t available in the EU and they are actively preventing usage in the EU). Another option is that they’re still out to kill the fediverse. That one honestly seems more likely to me, given how they’ve acted in the past (buying up platforms before they could outcompete them).
This is an incredible read on why Threads federating is bad news: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is the 1004th time I am seeing people mentioning this article.
I mentioned it 3 times in this last day since I read it! Maybe it is spreading.
I do it because I think it is the most important point on the fediverse. The fediverse is a tool of freedom, morals, ethics, for those that want to be connected, something that no commercial entity will offer. And it’s ok for it to not grow at all costs, or be the widespread available platform. It just needs to be present and faithful to itself.
I think the u/Kes put it really well. People on fediverse platforms are already staunchly opposed to big tech so they have no reason to leave for platform made by Meta of all people.
I keep seeing this article posted to scare people, but Lemmy and Mastodon aren’t in the same situation as XMPP. XMPP had barely any users outside of Google Talks, with the overwhelming majority of interactions on XMPP being between Google Talks users. Google was tying their product to a public standard that they couldn’t develop however they wanted, all for compatibility with very few users. When they pulled out of using XMPP to develop their own platform, the sheer lack of users on XMPP outside of Google Talks became apparent. This will not be the case with Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/ect. Mastodon has 10 million registered users, and Lemmy has hundreds of thousands. The majority of both service’s users are not about to switch over to sell their soul to the Zucc, so if Facebook federates for a while before defederating, Lemmy and Mastodon will have as large and robust communities as they have now, and the services will live on unlike with XMPP
Comes to mind that personally I had no commitment to Jabber or Pidgin, it was only a means to talk to people I wanted to talk, which I remained able to do after they were dropped. But Lemmy and Mastodon are communities, it takes more than tinkering with the protocol to kill it.
They would have to convince people who are here because they are already sick of Big Tech social media, that going back to Meta, of all places, is the right move. If they can do that, then it’s not a matter of EEE or whatever, it’s that we failed to maintain a compelling community.
I believe in this place more than that. Which is why I believe that if integration came to pass, it’s more likely that we would gain users, who would peek through the Meta windows and notice that we are having a better experience.
Our content will be drowned by the amount of content a mainstream Meta can output.
And if you would like for users to notice the free fediverse among that content, they would need to ignore all Meta/commercial communities. That’s not practical. It also amounts to defederating with Meta, which is practical, and what is suggested anyways. If people are curious about the free fediverse they will hear about it and find it.
Defederating isn’t the threat - the situation you describe would hurt the fediverse, but it would survive as you said.
You’re missing the far more insidious piece - changing the standards
So let’s say we have mastodon servers, threads, and maybe another player or two.
Context for my example - Lemmy and mastodon use paths, 0.<root post id>.<reply>.<reply reply>.<etc>
Facebook decides “path isn’t good enough for what we want, we’re changing the first number, always 0, and we’re going to set it to a number from 1 to 100000 that will encode topic, work appropriateness, and sentiment analysis into this value”.
Being the majority of the network, suddenly mastodon either throws out the threads content or the clients start breaking - the fix would be simple, but until that happens either they temporarily defederate or apps start crashing.
Either way, people are pissed - either their busy feed has suddenly gone quiet, or their app no longer works. It gets resolved in a few days, and now apps are able to do better sorting
The takeaway for most people is “mastodon sucked for a few days”
Now let’s say they use this sentiment analysis more deeply for the algorithm. They’ve got AI doing it, hell, they’re even being “good fediverse citizens” and running it on mastodon posts for free. Everything works better, you find stuff better, nsfw posts are better flagged, the clients add cool new features around it
Now, let’s say Facebook decides “mastodon is costing us server time, and we don’t make much off them. Let’s just show more threads content and only show replies and the top thousand mastodon posts each hour” Suddenly, mastodon users get much less engagement when they post.
Their takeaway is “mastodon isn’t as good for us as it used to be”
Maybe someone builds an open source system for mastodon to do classification. It’s much more expensive server-wise, so maybe only the top servers do it… But their posts get seen again, and everything is good again. People move to these servers or to threads so they can keep being discovered
Now, let’s say someone at Facebook goes “their classification isn’t as good as ours, and their nsfw tagging isn’t as good. Our advertisers would be pissed if they found out, let’s not sell ads on any post not classified by us just to be safe”. Someone else comes along and says “we’re leaving money on the table here, let’s show less of those posts”.
And kind of like this, these little decisions made with little malice would slowly choke out mastodon. With a dominant player, the little guys don’t need to be targeted - Facebook just has to put themselves first. And if you think a company would consistently pass up on profits or savings for a vague promise as years go by, I don’t know what to tell you
If threads is a more stable experience, only privacy minded people would pick mastodon. Even people that refuse to use threads on principle would be less likely to be active on mastodon
In reality, the decisions and side effects would probably be more subtle than this… But it doesn’t take much. They just have to occasionally make the fediverse feel buggy or unfinished in comparison, and it’ll forever become a place for enthusiasts and never as a serious option by the public at large
It always felt like a backup plan. Or maybe that plan was before they remembered they had 2 billion users on Instagram they could bootstrap off.
Without activepub integration, I just see threads as another Twitter. I don’t think any of these walled gardens are very interesting, especially Twitter copies such as Mastodon or Threads. It’s just another platform for the few to get their message out to the many. It’s boring in almost all cases.
I know everyone doesn’t like the idea of meta federating but that’s the reason I got my wife to try mastodon. Just saying.
They did something similar a few years ago.
At one point they opened their messenger system and allowed XMPP clients to connect. This worked absolutely fine, and chatting in any XMPP compatible client was possible.
But it was also possible to OTR encrypt the data so Facebook only got seemingly random character strings that are absolutely useless for data harvesting and profile analysis to sell to advertisers, so they closed down the messenger and disabled the XMPP bridge not long after they opened it.
Same will happen here: As soon as people start interacting in a way it is not possible for the company to track everything, they will stop allowing it.
On a personal note: I will defederate from Meta as soon as they establish their ActivityPub bridge (it of course will only be a bridge, or does anyone really think they would base one of their main features on an open standard?)
Called it. I said this last week when everyone was still hysterical about blocking Meta:
Everyone is talking about defederating preemptively because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. So, doing what any exec does, he looks for buzzwords and trends to make his new product more exciting. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
It’s ironic, considering how much we’ve been fighting over whether to let Meta in or not.
Fuck me, that’s exactly how society works, some bully doing something, the normal people fighting over it, then the bully going “never mind lol”.
That’s true, although I’ve been saying all along that Threads’ potential arrival is a great opportunity whether or not it happens.
I haven’t heard a single valid reason why federating with Meta is bad. Only people misunderstanding how technology works.
edit: remember pretty much all objections can be solved by personally blocking the domain, rather then forcing it to be blocked for everyone. Also that all the information Meta could possibly get, they can already get regardless because all of our content is public.
Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! has plenty of perspectives from both sides.
They don’t need to. There’s not any more information they’d get that they can’t already get. You realize all our comments are public and scrapable, right? Regardless if they’re federated or not, our content is public for anyone to scrape.
That’s incorrect. Followers-only posts (and local-only posts on instances that have them) aren’t public. Profiles that don’t make public and unlisted posts aren’t discoverable. And, as Threat modeling Meta, the fediverse, and privacy discusses, there are plenty of things that could be done to reduce the amount of data that’s public.
Also, that’s only one of the many reasons people oppose federating with Meta.
I hope this can be a polite argument of different opinions.
Like others said it could be bad for the fediverse in the long run. If meta joins activitypub they are the only ones that are really winning. We get access and engage their content, which promotes their network. They would be the largest node by far and it will give them power to influence activitypub. They can push “features” that only works within the threads network and when they don’t work with the rest of the fediverse creating a disparity in the userbase. People on threads will think that we are the ones that are weird for not having them since all users on threads have them and will probably push, “just download threads”. (Kind of how apple controls iMessage and how people get bullied into buying iphones just so they don’t have a green bubble, the fediverse is the different one that will need to adapt to meta wishes) Or maybe they can suddenly decide to defederate, and now all the people that had connections with threads will be forced to download threads if they want to keep those connections. People that would otherwise never had downloaded threads in the first place. Regardless of the outcome, they join to stay or leave, they are the ones that will win in the end.
This has been done in the past. Its Microsoft " embrace, extend, extinguish" philosophy. A recent example of an open standard is the XMPP being killed by Google. Ultimately meta is a for profit corporation and they have every incentive to monopolize this space.
You brought up the point of people being able to block the domain. The vast majority of people don’t change the default settings so the fediverse experience would include threads by default. Just like how ppl can block meta, and since the majority of fediverse don’t really want the connection, if threads is so important for you why can’t you sign up on their pratform?
For me, other than my concerns with the future of the fediverse, i also consider is that meta is so bad that threads is not even available in Europe because of safety and privacy concerns and so I want nothing to do with it.
One last thing, meta was supposed to join WhatsApp, FB messages and Instagram direct, meaning from each of those platforms you could message ppl on the other platforms. They haven’t even been able to do that yet. They connected FB and Instagram but not WhatsApp yet bc ppl opinion of FB is low enough and the backlash was big enough.
Hopefully I managed to convey my reasons why the federation with meta is bad.
But also, what are the good reasons to federate, like you (just opposite) I haven’t seen a valid reason to federate.
We need multiple corporations joining activity pub
As soon as they start pushing features, it’s no longer ActivityPub, but a fork of ActivityPub. There’s no reason why our fedi clients would be forced to adapt. We already have this weird display issue sometimes, like upvotes and threads on Lemmy not properly showing up on Mastodon for example. It’s not a huge issue if it’s not entirely interoperable.
That just download threads mentality already exists. If you think it’s an issue on the internet, it’s 10x more powerful in person. It already exists, it won’t suddenly appear when Meta federates. If you make a new best friend in threads from Mastodon and Threads defederates, surely that isn’t your only point of contact? If it’s that important to you that alternative means of communication isn’t viable, then maybe just download Threads if they aren’t willing to download Mastodon. That’s more of a social issue which greatly varies per person.
I think you’re speaking for others when you say it’s too hard to defederate for users. For the sake of Mastodon, you just press the three dots and block threads.net. That’s very easy UX, no settings involved. Also I can say the same, if choosing to restrict everybody from threads instead of just yourself is so important, why can’t you simply press that block instance button? That way you aren’t taking choice away from others.
The reasons to federate should be obvious. People. That’s the whole point of social media. I don’t want to be restricted to fedi users who think they’re superior then the average person who uses Facebook. I’m not going to stop using Mastodon either just because I don’t like these people. I want to talk to family and friends. I want to invite the people I actually like because decentralization and growing the fedi is good for all. More content the better. That’s what social media is.
The user base on a platform like Threads is probably quite different from that of Lemmy (or reddit) Federating with them means their content is starting to also flood to our platform and in a big way due to their huge number of users meaning that we’re getting our faces stuffed with facebook quality content that many specifically is trying to escape here.
Then block their domain. Problem solved. Any other objections that can’t just be resolved by personally blocking the domain? Don’t ban it by default, give users the choice to ban themselves or not. There’s no downside.
Lemmy doesn’t currently give the option for users to block individual instances. If it did then that would indeed be a better solution
Lemmy will surely add such basic feature at some point.
It’ll definitely add that feature in the near future. I’m confident it’ll land before/if Meta goes ActivityPub.
There is a downside: Because many people don’t see the negative long-term effects, Facebook will have enough time to influence and dominate the Fediverse in a negative way. The masses don’t see what Facebook is doing in the long run.
There’s also not much reason to federate with Facebook. Sign up there if you like that network.
I say not federating is influencing the Fediverse in a negative way. Since I obviously don’t agree with that, it’s more content. I don’t like gatekeeping and this sense of toxic superiority that fedi users are above average Meta users. I want to talk to my family. Same can be said with your influence argument, they can sign up there already and use the fedi, which means they’re being influenced already.
I’m extremely against this gatekeeping and want these users. That’s the whole point of social media, to communicate with people. More people is more content, which is the whole point. I don’t want to only communicate with smug users who think they’re superior to a normal person.
I’m very suspicious of Meta and its intentions. I also don’t think I’m better than a Meta user except in my choice of social media platforms, which is only even possible because I haven’t gotten myself into social groups that primarily communicate there. Not everyone is so lucky. If my social group were slightly different I might be a resentful Meta user holding my nose because I would value having a social life over avoiding a company that’s got pretty much everyone entangled anyways. I’d probably try to get people to move platforms, and probably complain about Facebook and Meta as often as I could without annoying everyone, but it’s very likely that they wouldn’t all move off the platform just because one person in the group hates it.
Meta users are welcome to come here. I want everyone to have a non-enshittified, non-corporate social media and that includes people who are currently on an enshittified corporate social media. But Meta itself is not welcome. That means no Threads, no touching us with Meta, go make a non-Meta Fediverse account first. Even if defederating them might not be the most effective, even though they can scrape all our stuff regardless of their federation status, I want to send the message that Meta is very unwelcome here. But its users are welcome. We shouldn’t try to hoard the non-enshittified place all to ourselves. Only gatekeep the place from people who will try to enshittify it—and Grandma from Facebook is not going to try to squeeze us for cash.
So you want the users, but not them to enshittify it, but you also want them magically to come without federating because you think you have a superior sense of social media. Which reality are you in, and how do you intend for the fedi to magically become mainstream with this zero compromise dream scenario you’re coming up with? I don’t even agree with gatekeeping people you think are shitty, because there’s already a terrible fedi population out there like creepy anime instances, truth social, and kiwifarms, etc. Those are all much worse then what you’ll find on Facebook and are already on fedi. Has it ruined the network?
This is just completely idealistic hoping that wants a situation that will never happen, has already failed to happen, and is ignoring the reality of the situation. For the fedi to grow, it means also shitty people coming. That’s where the proper moderation tools become important.
So you want the users, but not them to enshittify it
What I meant by “enshittification” is this:
The linked article explains it a lot better with a specific example in my opinion, but the example is pretty long, so I just provided the quick definition from the article.
I am very much not talking about “oh no the normies are coming, polluting our beautiful pure place with memes and innocent questions about how things work that we superior people already understand.” I am also not talking about people I think are shitty, you handle that by defederating instances with a high volume of shitty people and blocking and reporting the shitty people you still come across. I really shouldn’t have said
Only gatekeep the place from people who will try to enshittify it
because what I actually meant here was gatekeeping it from corporations who will try to enshittify it. Like Meta. I misspoke and I apologize for that.
from my experience there are some decent communities and people on FB, it’s just that you have to find them hidden under heaps of bullshit. No different from Reddit, Twitter or YouTube in that sense imo
With something like Lemmy though, both the users and community moderators have way, way more agency over what they’re interacting with, so I don’t think federating with mainstream social media would necessarily be that bad
I think, at least?
Because the long-term influence of such a powerful yet detrimental network like Facebook is bad, and when the negative effects for the Fediverse show up, or even later, when enough people realize it, the Fediverse will have been influenced in a way that it can’t go back to a healthy state.
So who determines what’s healthy, and why do you feel the need to take away the choice from others?
“healthy” here means “healthy for the Fediverse”, which means “being nice to each other” and supporting diversity, both values being contrary to the Facebook network, which is predatory to other networks, as having proven in the past.
The need is to prevent the predatory network from accessing the weaker one that promotes diversity and freedom of choice.
It’s that way because of moderation. Trust me when I say, there are some extremely vile servers out there that are significantly worse then anything you’ll find on Facebook. Also I just read this as gatekeeping, assuming that the current users are somehow better to each other then the average person. Also the fedi is one of the least diverse communities I’ve ever seen.
It’s not about the users, but Facebook as a company that has its own agenda against its users in order to make as much money as possible.
It’s also about Facebook seeing other networks not as friendly co-spaces, but as competitors that it tries to crush.
If you talk about users though, the “worse servers than Facebook” are by far less powerful than Facebook, and they impose no danger to the Fediverse.
Same here.
It’s simple. Meta does not do this because they are nice. Their goal is to collect data, grow the Market and remove competitors. This also includes appeasing (mostly European) Regulators by appearing nice.
Do. Not. Trust. Them.
Don’t know how many times this needs to be said. All your content on the fedi is public. There’s nothing they can see by federating that they can’t already see. Please understand how the technology and privacy works on fedi.
@mojo @nexusofprivacy I don’t want Facebook content in my mastodon feed. Period. If they federate here I’m leaving.
You realize you can just personally block the domain lol. Problem solved. This is what I mean by people don’t understand the technology.
It’s not only about ignoring Facebook users. Imagine in real life a bully comes to your group and you could block him, so you don’t see him, but he still influences the people around you in a negative way, changing the environment you used to love. You better make sure he stays out of your circle. Facebook has a long record of destroying other social networks.
So you want to take away the choice from others? What’s stopping those same influenced users from being influenced already? They can simply download the app right now, it doesn’t need to appear on their Mastodon or whatever feed.
Nobody’s talking about taking the choice away from others. Some instances are saying they’ll federate with Threads, you’re free to move your account there. Or as you say, people who want to hang out with the bully can download the Threads app right now!
No
Hell yeah!
Euuuuh… Is it me or is some parts of the article setting up/opposing LGBTQ+ against non-lgbtq?
“One of the interesting dynamics of the discussion so far is so much of the resistance to Meta has come from queer and trans people, and that most of the loudest supporters of Meta in the fediverse are cis guys.” This sentence may be technicaly right, but it’s
sooooo stupidmostly interpretation. Edit: wrong and uncalled forStarting from there, the article seems to be as much about “us va them” than threads and meta…
Why is it stupid? The article isn’t setting up the tension, it’s describing the tension that exists.
Unless I’m mistaken, if you remove the LGBTQ community everybody that left… Is cis persons. As in general “techy” world, most of the person using fediverse (and it’s currently changing rapidly, which is good) is male.
I may very well be mistaken, but the way this sentence is constructed make it feels like one information is being phrased in a way that fitting a certain point of view.
Anyway, I’m probably over analysing, as usual.
Yes, I certainly constructed the sentence to highlight the different reactions. Later in the article I say “And by prioritizing their desire to be embraced by Meta over queer and trans people’s safety, Meta’s cis advocates undercut their claims to be allies in ways that may be hard to recover from” – which is true no matter what Meta does or doesn’t wind up doing with Threads. Of course it’s not the only thing going on, but I think it’s important enough that it’s worth highlighting.
Actually I still think meta doing activity pub would be overall a good thing and a win for all of us. Users should decide what will be the best platform for them to use, free from any content locking reasons.
Meta being able to create completely new social network overnight and still getting more users then entire Fendiverse without the need to open up anything… That feels more like a loose for me.
But this is a very unpopular opinion here.
you know how they got those ‘more users’?
Yes by making it like a one-click Join from their other very popular platform “Instagram” and advertising it there.
That’s (most probably) why threads is currently not available in the EU. Gatekeeper practices like this would be illegal with the Digital Markets Act. But honestly it would be very easy to get around this. Just make it possible to join without an Instagram account. So I guess there are more concerns from Meta to not fullfil EU Standards than just this.
Sooo I guess EU finally did a good job here.
Thats true. But this also means they didn’t get all their users because they have a good product to offer. But because they are one of the biggest players and the just exploited their market power to will something into existence.
This is also the reason why your opinion is a bit unpopular. They just have a history of exploiting things and using dark practices to achieve their goals.
And if their goal is to dominate and wipe out the fediverse… they have quite some power to leverage. As they demonstrated with this stunt.
(Also this is quite likely their goal, because that’s how capitalism and competition works.)
But this is a very unpopular opinion here.
As it should be.
Users should decide what will be the best platform for them to use, free from any content locking mechanisms
Meta being able to create completely new social network overnight and still get more users then the entire Fediverse without the need to open up anything… That feeler like more of a loose for me.
Meta didn’t spin up a new service overnight; it’s integrated with an Instagram. The reason why they were able to get 100 million users in a few weeks is because they have a pre-existing user base… do you really think that Meta will give up their users so easily? The users that they make massive profits off of? If so, what makes you think that your local instance would have the resources to work against Meta’s billion dollar marketing budget to ply away a sizable chunk of their users?
Also, Meta now sits on the ActivityPub W3C committee… I don’t think that they will allow portable user accounts any time soon, especially if it threatens their profits.
have you read https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html? If/when you read it, I would be curious on how it changed your view in the topic. Or why it didn’t.
The fediverse is a tool of freedom, morals, ethics, for those that want to be connected, something that no commercial entity will offer. And it’s ok for it to not grow at all costs, or be the widespread available platform. It just needs to be present and faithful to itself.
Yes I read it and I simply do not agree with most of what is said there. XMPP is not dead and saying google killed it on purpose is to much of a simplification.
Worst thing that could happen if we federat with meta and decide on some point that this is a bad instance and block it, is that we go back to where we are now.
But since some governments and news companies already started to run their own mastodon instances it would be easiest for them to just keep up their own instance and federate with threads instead of creating another account on threads.
This plus all de Content created by people from the “free fedivers” would meta bring into a situation where they would want to be federated and therefore would (to an extent) do stuff to satisfy other instances. Our position against meta would be much stronger than how it is now.
So definitely not growing at all cost but excluding all form of commercial use of the fedivers by default would lead to fedivers remaining just a footnote in society without changing anything.
So I want not only meta but all of the big player to use ActivityPup and fighting for our (the users) favor without all their lockin tricks.
hi, anti-Meta person here: it’s not about how many users we have. it’s about Meta’s long track record of insufficient moderation and harvesting of personal data. thanks to their almost nonexistent moderation, they’ve facilitated genocides, let deadly disinformation spread unchecked, and contributed to the rise of fascism. and they harvest enough data from their platforms to create digital duplicates of us, and if they join the Fediverse, of course they’re going to harvest data from anyone federating with them too.
would you trust them to play nice in the Fediverse after all they’ve done?
I just want to make this clear I’m also anti-meta and that’s why I want them to feel a need to open up for users to make it easier to switch platforms.
I would trust them as much as any other new instance of any other platform that joins the Fendiverse. That’s my point.
and if they join the Fediverse, of course they’re going to harvest data from anyone federating with them too.
From the Mastodon blog post about Meta federation:
Will Meta get my data or be able to track me?
Mastodon does not broadcast private data like e-mail or IP address outside of the server your account is hosted on. Our software is built on the reasonable assumption that third party servers cannot be trusted. For example, we cache and reprocess images and videos for you to view, so that the originating server cannot get your IP address, browser name, or time of access. A server you are not signed up with and logged into cannot get your private data or track you across the web. What it can get are your public profile and public posts, which are publicly accessible.
That just shows how little Eugen understands the privacy risks. Why just blocking Meta’s Threads won’t be enough to protect your privacy once they join the fediverse has an example of how federating with Meta can expose private data. And, data can be public but hard to discover (a profile for somebody who only makes followers-only and local-only posts); federating with Threads adds exposure.
If they really wanted to they could already do that by setting up an instance and not publicly announcing it.
