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.
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).