Mastodon's official stance on Threads
There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.
It's all fun and games until Facebook starts adding features, then eventually starts defining what the fediverse should do to maintain federation with Facebook.
Embrance, Extend, Extinguish. Enshittification. Call it what you will, but i don't think this will end well for us.
This is my biggest fear. The hidden weakness of the fediverse is that the largest implementation gets to set the rules of federation
I disagree. Mastodon does not "set the rules" for federation of Kbin, Lemmy, Funkwhale, BookWyrm, Pixelfed, Peertube, or any other platform in the Fediverse. The platforms are interoperable when it makes sense, but they are designed to fill different needs and it makes no sense for them to follow some centralized "rules of federation".
Welcome to FOSS software. It's constantly evolving and forking itself. If Facebook wanted to fork ActivityPub RIGHT NOW, they could.
How would that impact your life at all? You could stay using lemmy and mastodon like you have been.
I think meta just wants to captailize on twitters demise.
I don't see how crushing activtypub would help them in anyway.
Mastodon is already massive and many companies (and the EU) have their own instance.
XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
Jabber was widely used in the early 2000s and not just among "nerds." But Rochko would have only been 7+ years old at the time so how would he know that.
The "brand recognition of Mastodon" part makes me think this has to be a joke... right?
yeah, honestly, i think the optimism is somewhat misplaced. we must ensure that proprietary solutions, like threads, are not the main way people interact with the fediverse. it's better to defederate early and continue in smaller communities while we still can, than to let them seep into every community we have, only for them to pull the plug later and lock everyone into threads.
i think it's alright to federate with them a little bit, but we cannot allow threads to become the most popular fediverse app
I may be speaking in defense of something I don't know, but I don't see a direct problem with other apps (e.g., Threads, Twitter if they change up what they're doing) to start talking with the fediverse.
The bigger problem is when they start throwing their weight around. The W3C (and groups like Mozilla) have had many strong battles with Google trying weird stuff because they're the biggest guys in the room (e.g., FLoC).
As long as we can rally behind the loyalist FLOSS geeks, we'll always be alright.
Man who signed NDA with Meta is suddenly gushing about Threads. I know, I know, this isn’t just anybody.
He addressed a few issues very topically but side stepped a major one. What happens if Threads takes off and Meta decides to enforce a trusted partner network by defederating all but a handful of instances unless they conform to Meta’s demands?
After all, if we allow Threads to grow to a successful size, that is where almost everybody will be. It is why Lemmy was a tiny project for a long time until Reddit and Twitter fucked up too badly and for too long. Twitter sucked all the air out of the room for Mastodon. Arguably still does despite itself. And Reddit did the same with Lemmy by simply existing.
Now imagine if Reddit made a Lemmy instance, kept policies around to make it grow large, then cracked down with an iron fist once they had the dominant position?
Eugen considers what would happen if Meta abandoned ActivityPub. But I don’t think would need to happen. They just need to wall off. They can keep the standard.
Another example: Google and RCS. The RCS Android users have isn’t the open standard. Google built a layer of proprietary middleware around it. They fiercely guard API access, which is why only a few “trusted partners” get to use it. And now Google is RCS. There are no more competitors even though it is open.
Because Google sucked all the air out of the room and became the dominant player able to dictate to the rest.
And so, too, will happen with ActivityPub and this whole shebang unless we stop them from being interoperable first. I get Eugen wants this tech to grow and prosper. But you don’t do it by making deals with the devil.
The one thing that you can trust 100% in all of this is that Meta's intentions are evil, because Meta's intentions are always evil. They see a new community finding its footing as prey to be seduced with features and then slaughtered for profit. They meet leaders behind closed doors and make them sign NDAs. Next, they'll start throwing around their unlimited resources to take over.
Immediate and universal defederation is the only answer. It's the only defense.
From what I recall, it was FB & Google federation of XMPP, and a huge number of various IM bridges that made XMPP usable at the time. I did have my own server, and all the nerd/geek friends I knew (so the vast majority of my friends) did the same. I even set up a servers at $job[-2] for intra-office communication, but still couldn't get decent buy-in.
These days, aside from a few die-hards, I don't personally know anyone using XMPP. I even ended up removing my server a while ago, because it had been years since I even launched a client to connect to it and not chat with anyone...
Google Talk was using XMPP from 2006-2013. Facebook Chat was using XMPP from 2010-2014.
It was these two services that killed all the prior messaging apps (and eventually XMPP too), and I was referring to the before-times.
What's your definition of widely used? Because Jabber definitely wasn't widely used lol. Like a handful of companies adopted it for internal communication, but other than that it was all tech enthusiasts. MSN Messenger was widely used in the early 00s.
XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
I love Mastodon and the Fediverse, but to pretend that we are not a nerd circle is a bit disingenuous.
Yeah, it's a bit naive to think this can't go the exact same way XMPP did.
Yeah, if he thinks Mastodon is mainstream, he should check again.
Yeah I only hear about Mastodon last year. Found out it's been a thing since 2016 lol
Textbook hubris.
His blog post will be another cautionary tale to tell in the near future.
Ultimately, people are selfish.
Whatever meta promised him is worth him selling out of his scruples to the community.
I don't hate him for that, but the dude should at least have the balls to be honest with us that that's what's happening here.
Meta joining the fediverse is not a good thing for the fediverse. To say otherwise is to invite ruin.
There's just more of us this time, but then the rest are also more.
There's way more nerds these days though, and a more normalized distrust for corporations.
This reads as incredibly condescending, naive and duplicitous, filled with hubris.
For starters, the whole “yeah sure XMPP got EEE’d but who cares, only nerds cared about that, lol” is not only false (e.g. Jabber), but also does nothing to quell concerns.
Here’s an account by someone who was in the XMPP trenches when Google started adopting it.
Notice something? The “omg so cool!”, this is exactly the same as Rochko.
It’s the hubris when you’re a FOSS maintainer who toiled away for years without recognition and now a $700B+ corporation is flattering him by wanting to use/interact with his work.
The blog is a far cry from the anti-corporate tone in the informational video from 2018.
Then there’s the fact that Rochko is extremely tight lipped about the off the record meeting with Meta and consistently refuses to deny having received funds from Meta and refuses to pledge not to accept any funds from Meta.
There’s also the unsatisfactory answer he gave to people who started questioning some dubious sponsors and the fact that he rushed to lock the thread, killing any further discussion.
I genuinely think the dude is just so hyped for the perceived recognition, that he lost the thread.
So much so that he thinks Mastodon is untouchable.
And it’s extremely naive to think that Meta has benevolent motives here or that Mastodon will survive any schemes Meta might have.
What’s more realistic is that Mastodon will die because people will flock to Threads if their social graph has moved over.
Similarly these lofty and naive ideas that people on Threads will make the switch to Mastodon once they get a taste of what it has to offer.
So now all of a sudden the “difficulty” to get started in Mastodon, that is keeping people who want a polished corporate experience away isn’t going to be an issue?
Especially when in the “extinguish” phase Meta will have siloed off from Mastodon and its portability function, having to leave their social graph behind?
It’s all so increasingly naive, one can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional sabotage at this point.
Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality.
Sure perhaps years from now a few hundred to a few thousand people might still use it, but it will be as irrelevant as XMPP is to most people, and Rochko with it.
@remindme@mstdn.social in 2 years.
I read your comment before I read the blog post and I have to say, I am finding it hard to align it with what's in the blog.
Aside from the hand-waving comment about XMPP, he does a great job of explaining how everything works, and based on my understanding of the fediverse and its architecture, its all true.
I dont understand what people think should happen here. If a large corporation wants to join, then there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. Its an open protocol. If you want to use Threads, join. If you dont, don't. If you want your server to defederate, tell your admin or join a defederated instance. If you want to federate, tell your admin or join an instance that's federated. If you want to control your own destiny completely, self-host.
There is tons of choice here and the way it's architected, several layers of protection. I dont get this moral panic everyone has. This is quite literally the point of a decentralized social network.
At the end of the day, if a large corporation joining the network, kills it, then it was destined to be destroyed from the beginning.
The problems I personally have with Meta are:
That and basically all the shit big corps do like make people angry and hacking people's brains to stay on the site for as long as fucking possible. Which they are 100% going to try to do here regardless of our intentions.
Aside from the hand-waving comment about XMPP
“Aside” is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, it reeks of a nauseating amount of hubris and makes one wonder if they’re suitable to maintain the project at all if they’re so oblivious to potential threats to the project.
I don’t understand what people think should happen here
Not roll out the red carpet for starters, and not engage with the company under NDA would be a good second.
Especially for a FOSS project that receives a healthy amount of contributions from others and likes to tout that it's co-owned by all contributors, it could be argued that it's highly objectionable for one person to engage, essentially as a representative, in non-transparent dealings that are sealed under NDA.
It really isn't rocket science, here's how the admin of the Fosstodon instance handled it.
Notice the lack of red carpet, the unwillingness to participate in an "off the record" event and the abundance of transparency towards the people he's responsible for.
I'm not saying that Rochko should've adopted the same abrasive "lol, get rekt" tone, its up to him if he's comfortable with that, but the points I'm hammering on about above can be achieved in respectful manner as well.
There is tons of choice here and the way it’s architected, several layers of protection.
There is no protection. As I've stated in a different comment, t doesn’t take more than 2 seconds of thinking to see how empty the words are that Mastodon is not at risk.
3 and 5 will happen in a cascading manner, the more people switch to Threads, the more others will also want to switch.
At the end of the day, if a large corporation joining the network, kills it, then it was destined to be destroyed from the beginning.
Perhaps it is destined to be destroyed.
The concerns and ramifications of a large corporation, or any entity that vastly overshadows the "organic" Mastodon user base in orders of magnitude for that matter, federating with Mastodon have been brought up numerous times by many parties, with the goal of looking for a solutions.
These concerns weren't only brought up in light of a possible EEE strategy that lead to the death of Mastodon, but also in light of a more Google-esque play where the market share isn't necessarily used to outright kill, but instead to exert control1.
Every single time it fell on deaf ears (i.e. Rochko ignored it, if not outright killing the discussion), often shrugged off matter of factly that it isn't a risk.
Also make no mistake, we're talking about a layered issue here.
A network that can destroy Mastodon against its will due to its sheer size is bad enough.
Mastodon, by virtue of Rochko, facilitating this from within, adds an entirely new dimension to this.
1 Google famously bypasses standardization bodies and simply implements their in-house developed standards, leaving other browser engines to get with the program and implement what Google wants, or become irrelevant
The sanest comment here.
Excellent post, and it is truly heartbreaking stuff. We know Eugen signed an NDA with Meta which just seals the deal for me given the other refusals to answer basic questions. I think he is probably a person who is finding validation for something he's worked on for a very long time, and Meta is blinding him. But that's what they do. They are emotional manipulators by trade.
Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality
This is exactly what happened with RCS. Sure, it is an open standard. But Google EEE'd it by adding proprietary functionality using their near unlimited budget and influence, then built it all around their own proprietary middleware, like Jive, to lock out others. Some of the most popular messaging apps, including Signal, had been begging Google for RCS access for years. Google refuses, because they firmly control it now. Only a handful of partners get to access the supposedly "open" standard which Google has co-opted. Sure, you could pour resources into the old, unmaintained RCS standard from over a decade ago. Before Google essentially killed it by moving proprietary and snuffing it out. But then it wouldn't work with Google's RCS, and Google's RCS is what people know as RCS at this point.
Meta will do the same thing with ActivityPub specifically, and decentralized social media in general. They will EEE their way to the finish line. They will wall it all off and prevent account portability and cross-communication outside of a preferred partner network. I could see them walling it off to the Meta-owned properties as they seek ways to further tie Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp together under a common protocol which they've EEE'd.
Yup, and very little people realize that almost all RCS implementations are by Google (often via their Jibe service).
They are emotional manipulators by trade.
You could say this about literally any big tech company.
Ultimately it's up for humanity to decide what it values most.
A lot of people are sick of BT, but so many are locked into their services and they don't have much capacity to change at the moment, so until that infrastructure for switching evolves it's going to be a while before anything really changes.
It's just as likely though that there are enough people who are indifferent too, which then implies that BT has a higher likelihood of doing what it does.
Too much is happening right now for any real projection to be made. Best we let this settle for a minute.
The whole XMPP was used by nerds thing really showed how full of hubris he is, agreed.
This is going to end in a disaster, and this blog post from him will be linked at for decades to come to try and warn the next generation the next time we need to do something like this.
And the cycle will repeat.
@remindme@mstdn.social 1 year
For me, I don't need new fancy features to communicate. I don't need video chat rooms. I don't need constant notifications. I just need a simple place to post my social expressions and read other people's social expressions. I don't want my experience to be shaped by algorithms designed to keep me engaged and present. For me, social media is like going down to the pub and talking with some regular friends. The BIGGER a platform is, the less it's about being social, and it's more about promotion. Promotion of self, events, clubs, companies, etc.
Threads will take away people from Mastodon, but that's a good thing. Because it will appeal to people who desire a different social media experience. They can take the foam off the top, leaving us with a smaller group that prefers a simpler, less invasive, social media. I don't have to share all my contacts, my browsing history, my health data or my financial data to Mastodon (or any service in the Fediverse) in order to use it. You cannot say the same about Thread.
I will always side with something like Mastodon over Thread. That doesn't mean I don't believe Mastodon cannot fail. It certainly can. But it won't be Thread that kills it.
My problem is a smaller Lemmy/Mastodon/fediverse means no niche communities. For example, I want to chat about all the individual specific video games I've played and I can't reasonably do that if there aren't sufficient people on Lemmy to do that with.
As for integration vs no integration with corporation's bittersweet pill I don't know my stance in that case. I seem to be getting conflicting information on how healthy this would be for the fediverse. Whatever gets me my niche topic chats, in a solid and usable UI, while avoiding corporate data harvesting, advertising, and political manipulation is what I want.
Can someone explain to me why people are so violently opposed to this?
If Threads blows up, and ActivityPub is integrated, you'll have access to all of it through any federated instance. No need to let Meta sap all your data to view it or communicate with it's users. Meta can't kill ActivityPub or force us onto Threads, just abandon it and leave us back where we are today. If you don't like the Meta users, just make or join an instance that isn't federated.
Anyone can scrape the metaverse data and use it for whatever, Meta included. Them implementing ActivityPub doesn't change anything about that.
Look I don't like Meta as much as the next guy, but this all just seems like illogical gatekeeping
Edit: I understand now, see: XMPP and Google. Good article someone replied to me with, down below.
Step 1: Threads starts federating with mastodon
Step 2: mastodon users happily engage with threads, letting it become the biggest fediverse instance
Step 3: threads stops federating with mastodon
Step 4: mastodon users switch over to threads where all conversation is happening, leaving the fediverse deserted
More than 5 million people signed up within hours, let's assume they will have 30 million users by the end of the month. I'm sure there are Mastodon users will consider switching to Threads.
https://www.marketing-interactive.com/meta-threads-garners-5-million-signups-in-first-few-hours
And not to mention the Threads app is a privacy nightmare. I'm sure they can figure out any fediverse user, If fediverse server remains federated with meta server.
One more thing, this mastodon server admin declined an invitation from meta
It's already happened in the past, it will happen in the future.
But Mastodon has less users than Threads already, if someone wanted to jump ship for more conversation wouldn’t they do it already? Heck, wouldn’t they have stayed on twitter?
Mastodon.social is the biggest instance
There's plenty of conversation already existing. Even my single user instance is barely keeping up.
Its not like this is how federation works, federation happens in 3 ways: a person follows a user, thus getting their posts, an instance follows a relay, which gets sent posts and spreads them back out like a vaccum, and 3rd boosting posts.
I don't see threads changing all that much if people don't follow those accounts, and or meta doesn't follow relays and send their posts out through relays.
Plus this isn't like its XMPP or something where people actaully care who they're talking to. I really don't.
This article sums it up very well: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
A monopolistic corporation joining a free (not gratis, free as in free software) network is always a hostile takeover.
Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. Big corporations want mainly one thing: gobble up as much value exclusively to themselves. They will take whatever means necessary to get there. The strategies to privatize public resources (XMPP, ActivityPub, etc.) are known. They look great for the public on the outside, but over the years will erode the value for everybody BUT them. In order to not let it get as far, many (including me) are of the conviction to not even give them a finger, let alone the whole hand.
Still don't get how their do that while there is already a big coperate backing with mastodon gbmh.
I guess the fear (and probable strategy for Meta) is to first establish themselves as just a reliable instance with a closed app (Threads). From there, it's a slow crawl to bring in the users, from outside but also from other instances. They have multiple tools for this: the infinite budget to develop Threads with exclusive features, just a better app, maybe influencer friendly ad models. The list is infinite.
So where's the rub? Meta is just introducing activity pub to more users.
The problem is two step: They'll eventually will lock in the platform from rest of the fediverse. It'll might be years from now but it'll happen (unless it's killed first if course). This hurts rest of the fediverse by making it smaller: They will hook in users that would've otherwise chosen another instance and now are in Meta's side fence which has turned into a wall.
Note: Not an expert, I just like to speculate.
I think what people don't want is the audience and culture that Threads is likely to bring to the fediverse, not so much Meta itself.
The audience is not the problem. Meta's mere presence on the network will be. We are now at a critical point in the struggle to survive as a network, and it's not looking good.
If we continue like today, the network effect (Google it) would eventually lead to ActivityPub being the de facto too-big-to-fail standard in all of the web. We aren't there yet, though. Meta knows this too and doesn't want it to happen, because extracting value from a diverse network is way harder than from a centralized user base. The fact that they even want to federate in the first place (shouldn't be in their interest!) rings alarm bells.
Because history shows big tech companies fuck over competition and that competition is us, regular people.
We’ve gone from not interacting with them to now being their rival and a direct threat to their profits.
Do you remember what happened with gtalk and facebook messenger? They both were based on xmpp. After moving away from xmpp (what both did), I didnt have use for xmpp anymore. Honestly, Meta has given me no reason whatsoever in their whole record of existence to earn my trust.
People are mainly afraid of EEE (Extend, Embrace, Extinguish) playing out agian.
don't know about you folks but this sounded so arrogant to me:
There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is a great read for anyone curious about what happens when a greedy platform that grows at all costs "helps" an open platform.
Same. This was an incredibly weak defense of why this is "totally not the same" as XMPP
Yea, I don’t think the original poster understands why google hurts XMMP, because by that logic once google left XMMP is also let at where it is at before google joined.
The issue with cooperations joining federation is they almost always have better infrastructure, they will siphon users out of the wider network with convenience. Then eventually they will forcibly leave the network with its users, because that makes them more money, at the cost of their user and everyone else on the network as we get less connectivity.
Right, the problem is more the new users - who might even have been on Mastodon/Pleroma/etc. if they didn't hear about threads - will just go to threads. The EEE stuff comes later, and the article kind of realizes this without realising it - the EEE stuff will come maybe even years later and yet Mastodon will be where it is now. Their growth will be stunted.
Totally sniffing their own farts. The "brand recognition of Mastodon", someone might want to look at the scoreboard before saying they're going to win the game.
FOSS is the ultimate form of software. It's like life, it will just get copied and forked and modified, and it will continue to evolve because it's been set free in the world.
Yeah, Facebook might embrace-extend-extinguish the Fediverse. But on the other hand, it's not the end of the world if they do. Right now, we have a decentralized platform to post, talk and interact on. If that changes, we will create another one
To me, the most interesting part about this is that the Fediverse is even on Facebook's Meta's radar. It's tiny. Do they see it as a possible competitor?
They see it as free data. Meta will always suck data wherever they can. Remember they have a LLM engine too and lots of money and lots of data to train it on – but more's even better. They can have swarms of bots trained to spread whatever the highest bidder wants them to spread. They can PR whitewash a brand or a celebrity, they can twist events, they can influence elections.
It was free data to begin with. It's always been free data. All those internet posts you posted from some lame message board 25 years ago are still there. It's probably still on Archive.org.
If you're concerned about your privacy, don't post shit you don't want out there on a public forum.
They probably don't need to make a whole platform to do this, though. Couldn't they just slurp the data right out of ActivityPub without making Threads? Either way, I'm dismayed that meta is managing to YET AGAIN convince people that this time they'll be good
Facebook never operated misleading bots. Companies that ran those bots utilized Facebook as their delivery method.
I think it could be a way to get around privacy laws.
Those laws quickly becomes difficult to apply when everyones posts are no longer on central servers owned by meta and instead is copied across thousands of instance owners.
But I think their primary objective is to take on Twitter and get people to use Meta instead. It doesn't cost them much to start experimenting with the tech, and being first somewhere is always an advantage.
What we know
Threads is a separate app from Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. This means Threads’ user base will be separate from their existing platforms.
Well that aged like milk…
Aged? The article is recent.
It is a pretty dumb comparison, though. Dude should have done his homework.
Which corroborates Eugen either being really damn naive or a paid shill.
Defederate. Meta would do nothing but rot the fediverse from the inside
The instance I'm on already took that step, and I was thrilled to see it.
Meta needs to be split up at this point, as do many other tech companies.
Yes, once a company is a certain size it has too much power to exploit and do a crappy job of customer service while they do it.
The problem with trying to break it up is that the FTC already allowed the mergers that let them get so big. They approved the purchases of Whatsapp and Instagram. Thankfully the new chair of the FTC seems to understand letting companies get this big is not good and is trying to block these things from happening in the future.
This is why we can't have nice things. It was nice to be on platforms with no corporate stink for a brief moment.
If you're on another server, you still have that freedom. Nothing changes unless you want it to.
I had heard, of course, that Rochko was in confidential talks with Facebook abiut something. This is disheartening. Facebook is toxic and must be kept out of the Fediverse.
Confidential is something which is not meant to be disclosed, but people gossiping call anything as such that has not been yet divulged to the public.
Partially correct. Your point?
Yeah, right.
tHeRe's No fUCkInG waY FaCEBooK wOULd EVER SUcKed Up aLL liFE FRom soMETHinG GOoD aNd tHEN LefT iT tO DiE WheN it'S nO LONgeR uSEfuL U guiZ!
You might want to get your shift key serviced.
When has this happened?
Remember what Google Groups did to Usenet? We should be wary.
Breathe life into an almost-dead format and worked hard to retrieve as much post history as possible? Yeah, I remember what Google did to Usenet. Do you?
I remember it filling groups with non-text posts which could not be read by Usenet clients, among other things.
It didn't do anything. Usenet still exists and is active in some circles. It's not very popular, but it's as alive and well as it always was.
I should think there are many people who think Google Groups is Usenet, and they have to register with google to post on there. Recently I think they have removed the option to view the source of an article.
Usenet powers my fully automated piracy server still to this day lmao what are you smoking?
Usenet used to do more than just piracy tho. But I don't think Google groups killed that side of Usenet, did it?
That is so naive thinking I’m my opinion. They probably gonna use that in the long run to connect only their apps (like you can comment on Facebook from IG). Why would they want people outside of their ecosystems to connect with them? I deleted all their apps and I’m gonna do it with every Fediverse app that federate with them. I know that data in Fediverse is public but I wanted to join community-driven ecosystem outside of Meta.
Rochko has demonstrated to be either foolish or naive, and both are bad.
I'm not betting on him to having been bought, out of a minimum of trust, but it wouldn't surprise me if that's the case.
XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.'
Is he foolish? I can't tell, mastodon is massive. Look at mastodon.social, there's already plenty of people here.'
Mets is not different than any other person entering the fediverse. They are ultimately a company and will do what they need to be profitable. Ultimately they advertise social connection, and that's their business model.
Why is everyone acting like meta is different than anyone else, they're not special.
Because decentralized social networks don't need to be profitable. That's the whole point of this. Spread out, smaller instances, there is absolutely no need to for an instance to become so massive that it requires profitability to continue.
I see meta no different than the company behind mastodon
I can see the argument that Meta wants to kill the fediverse but I am kinda excited that we could possibly still get content from feeds that would not consider a mastodon account, even if that is a disagreeable attitude. Looking at Threads it already looks like brands "autosport, financial times" etc have setup regular posting schedules on threads so it really could be the Twitter killer.
Can someone ELI5 what this means for Lemmy, Mastadon, and other platforms that are federated?
I thought the point of federations was to allow server instances the ability to prevent other instances from interacting with one another?
Couldnt servers just block or prevent Threads from interacting with them?
Just reading this? I don't understand how this truly changes anything at all. Why is everyone concerned? The API isn't owned by Zuck but open for usage.
The fear is a practice called "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" (or EEE). It's been used by tech companies before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
It, in theory, could work like this:
Then the enshittification process begins, by moving the focus from users to other interests (usually advertisers) at the expense of users. And eventually to the platform owners, at the expense of advertisers. Though I guess they'll skip the middle step, being a public company?
Yes they can block threads, but they have to choose to. So some people might be on servers whose operators don't block it. And, well, some people might actually want it. I see a lot of Mastodon accounts moving instances in the future.
Interesting times, we have Elon destroying the user base in twitter, sending users to the fediverse (add in reddit), whilst his mate Mark launches Threads and starts courting the fediverse. They're two billionaires. They both have the same vision. Monopolised control. One destroys whilst the other builds. They're in this together. Don't be so blind. De-federate!
I'm a lot more optimistic (aka naive) than most it seems.
I'm really new to all this fediverse stuff, but I believe we can't lose what we already have, people that are here before Threads, will probably be here after Threads, since we already made that decision to leave reddit or twitter, to leave all that behind is a big social sacrifice.
My red line for Threads will be if they start to mess with the standards and the ActivityPub protocol, acting in bad faith.
People can and will be willing to go back to the corporate side if their service are perceived to be better. Reminder, Reddit wasnt in this situation for years, carried by decades of unpaid volunteer work, it is only when they pushed the line too hard that we moved to other alternative, despite being the same company as they ever: profit first, user second. If Meta could pull off a better service, and looking at the money at their disposal, its highly likely, it wont be far fetched to predict users would move to Threads for better integration, and leave other servers years behind, and when Threads makes the move to extinguish, our community would have been too far behind to ever recover our stand.
It wont be the first, or even second time it happened. IE did it, Microsoft Office did it, Chrome did it (to a lesser extent), by this point, we should be suspicious of any move by big corps, just by the sheer ease of them pulling it off.
We kept losing, and will keep losing, because billionaire megacorps simply have the money to move worlds if doing so aligns with their ‘interests’ (ie money). This hasn’t changed, and won’t change now either; the Fediverse is done for.
Fuck Facebook for ruining another good thing.
Enjoy it while it lasts, and don't get too attached.
It's an inevitable aspect of what happens when the Internet is commercialized.
Something something French Revolution
Damn you're depressing
When people like Zucc get involved in anything and the appropriate amount of skepticism isn’t shown, you’re left with little reason to be optimistic.
ActivityPub won't ever "truly" die, it might lose the chance of becoming "the salvation from mega corporations running the internet" though. We'll always have the possibility of running small-ish, tight-knit instances.
But agreed, fuck Zuckerberg and his cronies.
Enjoy it while it lasts, and don't get too attached.
It's an inevitable aspect of what happens when the Internet is commercialized.
Question if a server defederate from threads but is still federated with a server that federate with threads can meta get your data
Meta can get your data in any case. ActivityPub is inherently public. You should assume anything you post on Mastodon, Lemmy, or KBin is public.
It was right there in the name all along!
I think this is reasonable.
It would be interesting to know what Meta told them.
I imagine they've used a FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) strategy to paint themselves in a good light and being without them in dark clouds.
I agree with him completely, why are people so he'll bent on fear mongering this? The worst possible outcome is that the fedi will... be exactly the same as it is now lol.
Meta doesn't care about the Fedi population, they're not even 1% of their userbase, and they know that the fedi crowd is one of the most anti people of their network.
There is no embrace-extend-extinguish. If Meta starts to change up the ActivityPub protocol and then make it proprietary, then networks like Lemmy and Mastodon will just stay on the original one. They can't force the fedi to follow, and they know this.
They can't inject ads or data scrape more then they already can. Your public info is already public, which can be assumed that it can and is being scraped. This exact comment is one of them. They can scrape your info the exact same as they can now.
This will introduce more people to the concept of the fedi and they'll be more willing to migrate to other platforms like Mastodon/Lemmy when they understand the concept better. This is only a good thing for the population, and we won't lose any to the new network as stated before.
So at that point, what is a single downside of this? You can even just instance block them if you still dont like it, so it won't even affect you then.
The size difference between Meta and Mastodon isn't even funny. Mastodon is basically a rounding error.
But even if Meta wouldn't even represent a significant proportion of the fediverse's user base, their presence could influence the development and evolution of ActivityPub and the network. Meta's financial resources and influence could drive changes that a smaller, independent network like the Fediverse might disagree with but have little power to resist.
How would the fedi not have the power to resist? People will just create forks removing unwanted changes. Given the grassroots nature of the fedi, I can bet there's a ton of people willing and qualified to do so. Meta can't do anything to the fedi, we're already independent and fully functional without their involvement so we have zero reliance on them. I don't see how we'd ever have to rely on them.
Fediverse will even be broken, just as we are now arguing about what will or will not happen. Fedi will not be the same. What will remain are broken pieces of it.
I say we counter EEE with FFF: deFedereate, Forget, Fuck 'em.
@remindme@mstdn.social in 3 years
@InfiniWheel @bravelemmywinks (dev here) we currently do not support setting reminders that last for years 😀
Da heck? Do we have a FB shill?
That or a starry-eyed optimist who hasn't heard of XMPP and thinks Mark "they 'trust me', dumb fucks" Zuckerberg is really engaging with ActivityPub on anything resembling a good-faith basis.
Can you elaborate what you mean?
Want to ask how? I see meta no different than any other company or person joining the fediverse. They ultimately get no special treatment and are subject to each instances moderation.
Of course it's a shit product name that uses a generic commonly used term. :/
How can anyone trust Facebook over this? I just don't understand.
Honestly this is all secondary. I believe the main reason we aren't gonna defederate Threads and other big players when they join AP is that we just can't afford to.
Affordability isn't the issue when defederating. We have nothing to gain from them federating. I believe (given they are a multinational) that the automatic migration of accounts will only ever work in the direction TO threads, never the other way around. So, why are we federating with them again?
We absolutely do have something to gain and to lose, and that is users. Like it or not, the big players have the power to bring in massive number of people with marketing and brand recognition. And before you say to hell with Meta shills, if we fracture the fediverse in 2 parts, one federated with big players and the other without, I'd wager most users would prefer the first option when joining the fediverse. Just for reference, Threads got 5ml sign-ups in the first 4 hours, while Mastadon total userbase is around 10ml
Other way around.
Can we afford to host all the shit they are going to spam out there? The Fediverse already uses a lot of storage space to sync content.
Well I expected this once I heard he had signed the NDA and already stopped using Mastodon, though I might look for another instance which doesn‘t federate with Meta later on.
Whatever floats their boat I guess, while I appreciate the attempt at an answer of whether they will use EEE, I don‘t think it was a satisfying answer, cause specifically others this happened to before did not end up "the same", but worse, as users abandoned them after the bigger thing started introducing interoperability issues and features which made switching logical.
LMAO, i didnt knew that its not in the eu already..... Oh wait the data privacy law is something here.
Threads will just straight up kill the fideverse. Ping me in a year or so!
Honestly doubt that threads will kill anything.
I would not take that risk. If it kills it. It happens fast
Why are people mad at this? Being able to communicate with Threads users from mastodon servers, is good? Right?
Read this and you'll see why people are very skeptical.
Still not convinced. If Mastodon or ActivityPub dies we'll have Bluesky and AT. Not worried. Good to have options.
I know we all dream of having all our friends and family on the Fediverse so we can avoid proprietary networks completely. But the Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse is not looking for growth. It is offering a place for freedom. People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it.
This is incredibly naive. Mastodon/ActivityPub is much more popular than XMPP was lol
I think there is a risk that Threads will be massive, and so people will think that the way to get on Mastodon is Threads, and eventually that Threads is Mastodon. C/f Google Groups and Usenet.
Well, time to delete my mastadon account I guess. That was short lived. Glad I never got around to adding them to my patreon. (adding lemmy.world, mstdn.world, lemmy devs was on my list, possibly my new instance lemm.ee as well.)