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.
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?
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.
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.
It’s 1.5M users on a single server. There are literally thousands of servers.
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
You can’t trust Facebook, it’s about turning its users into a product for marketers, and that’s it.