Adam Mosseri:
Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.
Anyone who doesn’t understand that connecting in any way to Facebook is not a good thing … is either very naive, or complicit to wanting to take down the fediverse.
Facebook already has enough content and enough of a platform on their own – they literally control half of the worldwide social media network. Why do they want to spread into this new space?
The only reason they want to be on this side is to conquer or destroy.
This perspective of “Either you agree with me or you’re complicit in a conspiracy against me” is incredibly childish and immature.
Sometimes people have different opinions than you. Try to find a way to deal with it.
To me it’s like warning someone to not stand in the middle of the highway, and having some guy go “don’t tell me what to do, I have the right to disagree with you”.
There are idiots in the world and their opinions are actually idiotic. :)
It’s 100% super obvious that Meta wants to control the fediverse, and that’s why they are coming for it.
Can you explain how it’s 100% super obvious? I thought a popular platform with many users entering the fediverse might be good for exposure but it seems like the consensus here is that it’s actually bad. Help me understand how it’s bad?
In summary we know everything Facebook does is pretty evil, it’s “super obvious” that this will therefore be pretty evil too, right?
Since almost everything on the Fediverse is open for all to see, anyone can already be mining the data just by setting up their own instance of Lemmy or Mastodon. This might make it difficult to sell fediverse-generated data for profit.
I’m sure they have a plan (otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it!), maybe it relies on using their app which also has your real name and phone number, maybe it’s for some legal loophole which means all fediverse users technically agree to their terms just by federating. I don’t know what they’re up to, but given their previous behaviour I think it’s safer not to even let them try!
Maybe it’s to avoid getting hit by antitrust sanctions and some EU legislation:
“Look, we’re open, we’re using the same ActivityPub protocol as thousands of others, our users can choose to leave whenever they want” - Meta, probably
(…then 99% of their users proceed to DGAF and stay on Threads)
Ok yeah make sense! I’m definitely not a fan of Facebook’s and Meta’s data policies either.
But how is anyone going to control a decentralised platform tho? What you’re describing seems like it would only apply to users on instances controlled by Meta, i.e. on threads itself. Or maybe I still don’t understand how the fediverse works.
One way I can think of is by being such a big player that they dominate and can thereby exert their will. For example, lemmy.world is the largest lemmy instance and we’ve seen a few communities on other instances dry up in favour of the ones on the big server. Now imagine that server is a hundred times bigger than the next largest and the people in charge have an active financial interest in moving people to their platform - if they play it carefully (and I’m sure they’ll be employing people to think about how to do this) they can shift the existing content into a place they can control it.
That doesn’t really apply to Lemmy’s content though, since unlike Lemmy.world, Threads users won’t be able to create /c/ communities. If a Threads user wants to post to a community in a way that Lemmy recognizes them, they’ll have to post it to one under a Lemmy instance’s control, or Lemmy users won’t see a thing.
That was just an analogy, I believe Threads is targeting federation with Mastodon rather than Lemmy
Alright I see, thanks a lot for explaining
tell your friends
Normally and with very many other issues … I would agree with you … but on this issue I’m very adamant about what I see and believe.
Think about it … Facebook is a billion dollar corporation and they show interest in your little world and the little things you are doing and they want to join you. This is a company that already has billions invested in systems that already have billions of users and millions of dollars of man power and technological resources. Why do they want to step into what we are doing here? Why do they feel a need to step into our space? Do they need more users? Do they need help from us?
Big corporations are only interested in perpetual growth at all costs. They are also deathly afraid of competition or the potential of future competition. Look at the history of manufacturing, automotive corporations over the past hundred years … it’s a long history of the strong eating the weak.
I agree my argument may sound childish or extreme but in this instance it’s pretty clear … if you let them in, it’s basically the beginning of the end for the fediverse.
It’s the metaphorical Trojan Horse … once it’s inside and firmly established, everything will be lost.
I think there’s a much simpler explanation. Elon’s actions are causing users to want to leave the platform. Meta wants to pounce on this opportunity. ActivityPub is an established, open source protocol that allows Meta to quickly spin up a Twitter competitor. The federated nature means that Meta can reduce regulatory risk. At the same time, they can lobby for increased scrutiny of Twitter since it isn’t interroperable like Threads.
I have no idea if this is actually how Meta is strategizing. But what I definitely know is that Meta absolutely doesn’t consider federated social media a threat. They aren’t trying to squash us. They’re aimed at Twitter. If they make some change that degrades the experience for us, absolutely we should consider defederation. Until then, let’s try to make some converts out of Threads users.
It’s a type of squashing … they step in, take over, control it and the whole thing becomes something that is beyond our control and becomes another platform that is operated by a private corporation to manipulate and manage thought, content and private freedoms. Basically squashing the Fediverse that we originally wanted to exist.
Once a major powerful corporation steps in and is given access … it’s like allowing a local gang member in your town to use your living room to deal drugs … at first you get some benefits but eventually, they’ll take over your house, throw you out and tell you go somewhere else because you don’t own the house any more, no matter what anyone says.
That’s not how the fediverse works, there is no obligation for any instance to federate with any other, and there are large groups of instances that block each other right now.
Meta can’t throw anyone out of whatever instance they’re on, it’s just not possible.
yes not presently … but one an entity like Meta becomes the dominant system in this universe, eventually, they will build all the keys and controls to regulate it all … that’s the point when they will lock out whoever they want
this is like the debate with climate change … no one really understands what’s going to happen in a few decades so we don’t care … when in reality, the time to do something about some future catastrophe is now … it’s the same thing with the fediverse, don’t allow big corporations in now, because we won’t be able to do anything about it later when they’ve overwhelmed everything.
Meta is already the dominant social network, and yet here we are. They can’t take that back, they can’t stop people from spinning up their own ActivityPub instances (if you don’t know how, go to YounoHost and do it the simple way), Meta can’t stop these instances from communicating among themselves in any way their owners see fit.
Sure, Meta can lock out whoever they want out of Threads… but that’s the status quo already: the whole fediverse is currently “locked out” from Threads, they can’t lock it out any more.
As for climate change, the time to do something was over 125 years ago… so yeah, that boat has sailed many many times over:
https://blogs.bl.uk/science/2016/12/the-first-paper-on-carbon-dioxide-and-global-warming.html
They’re saying that those opinions are naïve.
deleted by creator
Tell that to @Gargron@mastodon.social (the creator of Mastdon, AFAIK). He’s very excited about this. And I can’t honestly understand why.
https://mstdn.social/@Gargron@mastodon.social/111576826633308486
Well he’s not alone … a number of relatively vocal “fedi-advocates” are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.
Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where “we” are up to.
From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves “the good guys” and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating “significant” technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They’re all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.
When face-to-face with the prospect of having “your thing” accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. “Growing the protocol” and “growing” mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.
This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they’re “the good guys” and don’t work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their “ethical-tech” world … the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.
Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer “growth” might completely miss the point especially if it’s by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.
And this is where I’m up to on this issue … both sides seem not to be talking about it much.
What is the “emotional”, “social fabric”, “vibes and feelings” factor in all this … that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens … when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL’s loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I’m betting most will feel off … like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit … passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves … “what was the point of coming here in the first place?”.
Now, to be real, it’s not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it’s an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won’t be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? … that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it’d rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)
Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they’re willing to drink for their ends.
For my purposes … I don’t think I’ll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens … the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it … I’d rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.
The communities you like, are shielded by those OSS terms: if Meta does something to the tech that the communities don’t like, they’re free to show Meta the finger. The tech is not, and can never be, controlled by Meta; the communities are not, and can never be, bound by Meta.
Meanwhile, having a company like Meta collaborate on developing and testing the tech, is something positive.
I get the argument and have made it myself. And it may very well be completely right.
The thing it misses I think is the broader cultural ramifications. There are network effects with federation and defederation. Already I think a zeitgeist has settled in the mainstream of mastodon that defederation and inter-instance drama is bad.
So mastodon stands to become a place that is basically Threads with some (very) small subsection on OSS instances that most users don’t know or care about.
The moment there’s any weird friction where something or some app doesn’t work on the mastodon side (maybe because handling the scale of Threads causes problems on the cheaper Fedi), the larger community won’t care, cuz they’ll be on threads and have been there or on IG from the beginning. And for all those that need/want that better thing, they’ll just move.
It’s worth remembering here just how much the Fedi is barely living off of the fumes of what donations it gets now.
All of that feels like the opposite of building out a new social web. It takes the passion and excitement away from the fediverse and mastodon etc and turns it into weird “why are you using that?” friction.
Now it may be that a balance will develop and the above won’t happen. It could be cool to be in the Fedi and talk to your Threads friends. Maybe all the instances will opt for simply silencing Threads, which is probably a nice compromise.
But, social media, for most, even those that care about OSS, is about the social part and making that happen as easily and enjoyably as possible. Forgetting this is the fediverse’s great trap/mistake. The moment Threads/Meta come in and trick us into thinking we can have our new social web and all of the convenience their platform brings at the same time, rather than building and learning how to do it ourselves without big-corps is the moment we give up on this project or lose the momentum to keep it going.
Or at least that’s the way it may shake out. And the broader point is that it’s not a technical problem. OSS isn’t a silver bullet that will save and protect us here. These are emotional, cultural and organisational factors, which don’t get enough recognition or air time as they should IMO.
Not that I care much about Mastodon either way, but you had me up to “Go back to Twitter” 😳
Nothing can be that bad, and even if it was, that doesn’t magically make Twitter any less of a teeming shithole, surely?! 🤯
My view on Twitter is that while it’s has shithole parts, there are still interesting and cool people there having interesting and cool conversations. Plenty as far as I can tell. So, depending on your values and how you use social media and how it uses you, I concluded a while ago that it’s not nearly as unreasonable to just stay on or go to Twitter as many here in the Fedi make out.
Truth is there’s just stuff there not anywhere else and if that stuff is what you’re interested in, go for it. This whole new social web thing is kinda complicated and will take a while to shake out.
That’s what I meant by it. And without knowing I have to wonder if Threads is in anyway better at a cultural level?
FWIW, I’m saying this as someone not really on any Corp social media (I have dormant accounts on Twitter and Reddit).
Your Mastodon data is already an open book to Meta if they care to have it. The protocol is open, they could already be black-ops scooping up everything that’s fit to federate without turning on Threads federation, so them doing that really changes nothing. And what I mean by that is that they could already have set up unknown instances to leech whatever data they want out of the Fediverse, which instances masquerade as normal mom and pop installs just federating and sucking up everything without bringing anything back to the table. There’s literally nothing stopping them from leeching everything out of the Fediverse at any time other than people being better at detecting their activity (and actively thwarting that activity) than Meta is at keeping it off the radar.
In this case they’re making it so that I might have a chance to follow and interact with people already in the Meta/Instagram/Threads atmosphere without having to convince those people to leave the confines of what they’re comfortable with and find a Mastodon instance to sign up for. Maybe they’ll be more comfortable with leaving Meta after dipping their toes in the open spec?
How is that not a win? If Meta/Threads decide that they want to fracture the protocol and go do their own thing later, so what? We’ll go right back to where we were before they brought their users into the Fediverse. If people decide that they value the Threads extras/connections more than they value the purity of the ActivityPub protocol then maybe Meta is actually providing something that matters and we’ve lost by not supplying that need before the corporate interest figured out that it existed. In that case we’ll deserve the death that causes in use of the open spec, but the open spec will still be there and people who want to do their own thing with it can’t be stopped now. The code to run an open ActivityPub Mastodon instance is already out there and it’s impossible to take it back now.
Everyone is out here decrying this as a subtle takeover of the Fediverse by Meta, but did Facebook “takeover” the HTTP spec when they started operating facebook (dot) com on the world wide web over the HTTP protocol? It’s an insane assertion. I’ve been running my own opensource web servers since well before Facebook was a thing and I’ve continued to do so despite most people opting to depend on a mega-corp to be steward of their online presence. That Meta has a very successful and popular website that I’ve never been a fan of has never impacted my ability to use the open protocol they operate on to continue doing my own thing. The same thing will be true here.
It really seems like people are just upset that Threads might bring ActivityPub to the mainstream and force them to contend with the realization that a diaspora of open spec implementations already lost the war to Meta/Facebook. We had that once before. It was called the World Wide Web and you could go and find forums, fan pages, company websites, and everything else back then that has since moved to Facebook (or other content aggregator sites) because people value the network effects and homogenization more than they care about one big company being in charge of it all. (…and not to belabor the point, but most of that stuff is still out there, it’s just waned in popularity because the network effects are not there.) Here we are with a chance to try and break things out again and people are seemingly worried that we can’t if we let the Meta users in? Maybe they’re right, maybe it’s impossible to achieve victory here, but gatekeeping the standard and enacting some purity test for which providers are allowed on the protocol isn’t going to tip the scales in favor of the open standards implementation.
If the protocol is truly open, then how can a corporation embracing it be a danger? We’re all free to adopt any changes or not at any point in the journey so it’s impossible to lose, you’re free to keep doing your own thing any way you look at it. Tell me how any of this is untrue.
TL;DR: Threads coming to the Fediverse is a good thing. It’ll make it possible to expand the network effects of an open protocol far faster and more than any amount of Fedinerds proselyting the gospel of ActivityPub ever will. The only thing that is at risk of being lost is that we’ll refuse to adapt to what end users want fast enough to keep a large corporation from bending the spec to their ends. Which loss again only means that you’d be cutting yourself off from those who WANT to embrace the revised spec by not adopting those changes yourself. That option (to just not adopt changes to the spec) can’t be taken away from you in the future, so worrying is only warranted if you feel like your ideal ActivityPub implementation can’t win out in the marketplace of ideas and that you’re owed that victory even if others are able to expand it in ways that people actually want to use enough to dismiss whatever downsides it contains.
This was the first comment on this post that made me feel like I wasn’t taking crazy pills. I agree completely. I still don’t see how Threads joining ActivityPub is a bad thing for us, unless it convinces a large number of people to migrate to Threads from their current instance.
The funny part is that blocking the instance makes it more likely that people migrate to threads. We’ve seen that when lemmy instances defederate from the larger problem servers, people will jump ship to be back in those larger communities.
Some people enjoy the “us vs them” exclusive club vibe more than they enjoy the actual content