Thanks, I appreciate it! It took a stupidly long time. :V
On some level, it’s probably not that important that people understand all this stuff, but I think the most dangerous thing is people believing that their data will be protected if Threads gets defederated. Any other confusion is basically harmless, but that’s the one thing where people have a false sense of security, because Meta has exactly the same access to your data whether or not they get defederated.
No, I don’t want to? Weird take.
There are literally, not exaggerating, over one billion Instagram accounts in existence. It’s self-evidently not the case that they have just silently registered everybody a Threads account and are counting those numbers.
Meta is categorically evil, but the pretty obvious gain from federation is the same as it is federating with anything else: content. Threads has people posting on it, some of those people say interesting things … the end.
That’s not to say that outweighs the downsides, like some of that content will also undoubtedly be hateful bigoted trash, and the moderation load of suddenly dealing with an order of magnitude more posts will be a huge strain on fediverse admins who choose to federate, but there’s undeniably something to gain.
Definitely. Meta is studiously only sharing the number of accounts registered. We have no idea how many of those are active. If we go with the old 1-9-90 rule, only about 10 million of those 100 million will become active users. Although, the rule obviously isn’t a universal constant. On the fediverse, for example, it’s closer to ⅓ of registered users that are active.
This is untrue. Threads accounts are reserved for the matching Instagram user, but those users have to actually choose for that account to be opened. If all Instagram accounts were auto-converted to Threads accounts there’d be over 1 billion Threads accounts. The 100 million Threads users are all people who have specifically opted to have a Threads account.
In fairness, I think we might already be the rest who don’t matter. Threads has just passed 100 million users in like three days. The entire fediverse, in about ten years (it’s tough to pin down an exact start date because “When did it become the fediverse?”), has accrued around 12 million users, of which less than 4 million are active. There’s any number of things Meta might want, but I don’t think greater access to 4 million geeks is at the top of their list.
I do think the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns have some merit. Meta isn’t threatened by the fediverse now, but maybe they do want to kill it before it becomes a problem. In the short term, though, we’re not overtaking Threads. Personally, I think another plausible theory is that Threads is using ActivityPub to demonstrate that they’re not running a monopoly or gatekeeping control of social media (which the EU’s new Digital Markets Act now regulates) by pointing to the fediverse–which will soon also include direct competitors Tumblr–and saying “See, we’re all on equal footing! We don’t control social media! Look over there at those 4 million geeks and whatever number of Tumblr users.”
It comes from Fortune, they can’t conceive of something that’s not a business.
Hard to tell. It’s been in decline since January though, so some of it is just Twitter being a place people want to be less and less.
Here’s the graph, as posted by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:
Get us a photo of the popsicle stick skyscraper before it burns down.
Lemmy communities are “groups” in ActivityPub parlance, and groups do exist on the microblogging platforms. Using Mastodon as an example for now, a Masto user could find the group equivalent to a Lemmy community and make a post and/or comment there and it would show up on lemmy.world and anybody else who federates with that Masto instance. In reality, the groups experience is kind of terrible and a poor interface to these thread-style communities, and you lose all kinds of features like the recency/score sorting algorithm, the ability to downvote things, etc.
It would take a true masochist to post to lemmy.world from Mastodon, which is why you almost never see it. I’ve seen one Mastodon user in my time on the threadiverse so far. Most people who are already on the microblogging side of the fediverse have just chosen to register a separate account on a threadiverse instance so they can have an actual usable interface rather than stuffing a link aggregator through a blog-shaped hole.
Groups don’t even exist on Threads currently. Maybe they will by the time they implement ActivityPub, but they may not consider that to be a core goal as a microblogging, Twitter-style platform which has no obvious use for them. This would currently make Threads an even worse interface to the threadiverse (kind of ironic) than Mastodon, which I can’t stress enough is already awful. You would just have to search for individual posts by browsing somewhere like lemmy.world directly, copying and pasting the URLs into the Threads app or web site to populate the conversation in their interface in order to reply to the posts and comments there.
In short, using Lemmy via Threads is probably going to be such a nightmare that only turbo-nerds will try to do it, and turbo-nerds are more likely to realize “This is awful and I should just go join Lemmy or kbin or something,” than persist with that hassle long-term. Now, kbin users have more justification to be concerned about how Threads will impact their communities, because kbin supports microblogging directly–in corporate terms, it’s like if Reddit and Twitter combined into one site that you could tab between on the fly. This means kbin users will be more likely to see Threads content and vice versa.
Yeah, they can vote and reply and all of that and others who remain federated will see their interactions, but you or any other server who defederates them won’t.
Yeah, my understanding is that defederation prevents any incoming communication, so you won’t see any posts or comments that come from lemmy.bullshit, however users from lemmy.bullshit will still see all of your comments and posts from lemmy.world unless they choose to defederate you back.
Now, this is odd. Perhaps it’s a bug in Lemmy? I’m reading this post on kbin (here’s the link to it on kbin.social, you can look without an account) and @Some_Emo_Chick’s original post has the link just fine, it’s the header link as you’d expect. If I go over to lemmy.world and view the same post, the header link instead points to a webp thumbnail from the article, hosted on lemmy.world itself. This seems to mean that the correct link was posted, since it’s what we got on kbin, but Lemmy fumbled somewhere and replaced it with the thumbnail.
Isn’t that privacy more illusory than actual? You’re not surfacing the web pages which show the votes, but the protocol is openly sharing that info and anybody can still see what your instance’s users have voted on just by looking at them from a different instance. I’m not going to out anybody, but it was trivial for me to find that thread here on kbin.social and see exactly who upvoted it, including a kglitch.social user.
Does EarthBound count? It’s sort of a sci-fi fantasy story which mostly takes place in a contemporary western setting (most of the game occurs in Eagleland, America filtered via Japan). There’s ancient evils, pay phones, psychic powers, a cafe, a bunch of zombies and a multi-level mall. Not all of the game is urban, with suburban, rural, swamp and alien areas, but there’s several cities to explore.
For the most part, Threads content just wouldn’t appear on Lemmy at all. It’s like how you can’t see Mastodon users’ timelines on Lemmy. e.g. Jeri Ryan from Star Trek is on
mastodon.world, but you can’t read her blog from Lemmy because it just doesn’t display microblog content, only stuff that’s sorted into groups (communities).The one exception is that Jeri Ryan can track down the equivalent group on her Mastodon instance and “microblog” directly into the group. Mastodon has some hacky tweaks to do things like reading the first sentence as a heading, the second line as a URL, and the third line as the post body, so if you’re especially dedicated you can post to Lemmy from Mastodon. If Threads cares enough, they could add similar functionality to Threads to make it technically possible to post to Lemmy as long as you try hard enough, but just regular people’s blog posts on Threads won’t display on Lemmy at all.