Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration

I look forward to reading everyone's calm and measured reactions
- My primary concern is that they appear to be allowing Thread content to be pulled into other Fedi clients, but not the inverse. So Threads content on Mastodon, but no Mastodon content on Threads. That’s not super great for Mastodon exposure.
  Also, given the vast differences in daily active users, wouldn’t Mastodon become flooded, and eventually dependent, on Threads content?
  
  Jfc sounds like they're just paving over the community with a giant ad of themselves
  
  Also, given the vast differences in daily active users, wouldn’t Mastodon become flooded, and eventually dependent, on Threads content?
  Servers only pull subscribed user content, so it's not like the option is nothing or The Firehose. Meta can't push content into the Fediverse.
  I think it's important to note that Meta doesn't have more power than anyone else here. They're just a large instance. They have the same forces keeping them honest as anyone else and their size doesn't change the incentives for mods and admins. Mods don't have an interest in working for Meta for free. If they're spending too much of their time moderating that content, Threads will be limited or defederated.
  Given Meta's size and history it's understandable to be concerned. At the end of the day though, they'll either play nice or get bounced. I think we'll be fine either way.
  
  I personally remain neutral on this. The issue you point out is definitely a problem, but Threads is just now testing this, so I think it's too early to tell. Same with embrace, extend, extinguish concerns. People should be vigilant of the risks, and prepared, but we're still mostly in wait and see land. On the other hand, threads could be a boon for the fidiverse and help to make it the main way social media works in five years time. We just don't know yet.
  There are just always a lot of "the sky is falling" takes about Threads that I think are overblown and reactionary
  Just to be extra controversial, I'm actually coming around on Meta as a company a bit. They absolutely were evil, and I don't fully trust them, but I think they've been trying to clean up their image and move in a better direction. I think Meta is genuinely interested in Activitypub and while their intentions are not pure, and are certainly profit driven, I don't think they have a master plan to destroy the fidiverse. I think they see it in their long term interest for more people to be on the fidiverse so they can more easily compete with TikTok, X, and whatever comes next without the problems of platform lockin and account migration. Also meta is probably the biggest player in open source llm development, so they've earned some open source brownie points from me, particularly since I think AI is going to be a big thing and open source development is crucial so we don't end up ina world where two or three companies control the AGI that everyone else depends on. So my opinion of Meta is evolving past the Cambridge Analytica taste that's been in my mouth for years.
  
  If they opened as read only then they created API in a most convoluted way possible. If that ridonculous claim is true then I wonder when we see first third party Threads apps.
- People on Mastodon are preemptively blocking federation. What can I say 🤷
  
  Just a nice high five for them not falling for corporate embrace and extinguish bullshit when it is in the embrace phase!
  
  Kinda lame. I wonder what site allows it
- Me too! Just keep calm and scroll!
- Came here to learn whether I'm supposed to like this
  
  Do you like snarky Wendy’s ads?
  
  did you join fediverse to escape big companies

I honestly forgot Threads even existed.
- I'm constantly reminded of it by instagram when they insert the most unhinged incendiary thread posts on my feed. Quite a way to advertise. "Hey, do you like to be angry and argue with strangers? Come join Threads!"
  
  “Hey, do you like to be angry and argue with strangers? Come join Threads!”
  
  If anything, this seems like a good reason to leave Instagram.
  
  Considering a significant portion of their userbase adores ragebait, it probably works out quite well for them lol

Didn't most of the fediverse preemptively de-federate them already?
- Mastodon.social, the biggest instance ran by Mastodon devs didn't and encourages wait and see approach.
  
  I'm on that server and that's how I feel too.
  If it goes poorly, then it can be blocked, but to not try seems silly to me.
  
  the biggest instance ran by Mastodon devs
  Did it?
- Is there a list of instance somewhere that we can pick from? I thought someone was putting together a list.
  
  https://fedipact.veganism.social/ lists instances with their decision.
  
  List of instances, which will block Threads, listed by MAU
  
  To see Instances that block threads.net click here
- A lot of instances did, the flagship instances run by the Devs of Mastodon didn't. They think that it's good and want to encourage it, though at the same time their instances have a spam problem so bad many instances have decided to limit them, making it harder to follow people if your account is on them.
  Also noticed that many people say they won't follow people who are on Mastodon.social or approve follow requests. Which is a bit extreme but I also get it, there's lots of spambots and not great people on those instances and moderation is slow since they're so big which doesn't really help.
- some do.
  I have a small community masto instance and don't. If my users want to block the instance, it's literally 2 clicks and a confirmation away.
  Doing to server wide is massively patronizing towards the users
  
  Nah, users can vote and then if they don't get the vote they want, they can go to another instance.
  
  I see it as just virtue signaling. At the end, we can choose to not join those servers who defederate with them, but I can also think it's a stupid decision at the same time lol.
  
  You might want to look up what patronize means, in the common phrase "don't patronize me" it's used sarcastically.
  Essentially, replace the word with "helpful" in your sentence, and you'll see why it doesn't fit.

Hi everyone, I am collecting preemptive pikachu faces for when meta inevitably attempts to screw the fediverse over. Please put them in replies to this comment so we don't clutter up the rest of the comments.
- 1999, XMPP is born. 👶
  2005, Google launches "Talk", touted as a "great victory for XMPP", with "large-scale XMPP services".
  2012, Google encourages "Talk" users to switch to "Hangouts".
  2013, Google drops open XMPP interoperability with other servers.
  2015, Google begins shutting down "Talk" clients.
  2017, previous phase is now complete, XMPP is virtually unheard of.
  2022, Google shuts down all XMPP integration. XMPP is, for all intents an purposes, dead. 🪦
  2016, Mastodon is born. 👶
  2023, Meta launches "Thread", touted as a great victory for Mastodon. ← You are here.
  2030, Meta encourages "Thread" users to switch to "Fabric".
  2031, Meta drops open ActivityPub interoperability with other servers.
  2033, Meta begins shutting down "Thread" clients.
  2035, previous phase is now complete, Mastoson is virtually unheard of.
  2040, Meta shuts down all Mastodon integration. Mastodon is, for all intents an purposes, dead. 🪦
  N.B.: The delays in the timeline were copied over verbatim. Historical conditions have to be taken into account, as the popular adoption of internet began in the late 2000s. So it is likely for the "extinguish" phase of Mastodon to happen much faster. I give it 5 years tops. And by 2030, we will all remember it as we now remember XMPP.
  
  2017, previous phase is now complete, XMPP is virtually unheard of.
  So it returned back to a state where it would have been without Google anyway.
  All the Jabber clients and services combined were never even close to rivaling ICQ, AIM, MSN, Skype, or whatever else ruled the IM space back then.
- Same old corporate strategy. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Embrace extend extinguish
Don't federate with corps, it will only end badly
- Please could you tell me what success looks like for ActivityPub if it doesn’t involve adoption?
  
  It'll look like what we already have. Swaths of users self hosting, with lots of redundancy to deal woth instances that have problems.
  And that might mean it needs to stay small, but that's OK. Not all success is measured in popularity.
  
  Staying free, open, and undriven by this idea of a shareholder that will destroy anything good in the pursuit of profit.
- Hold your ground men, stay on non-corpo socials (here)!
  They can't really do anything they couldn't already do if we do that.
- corpo philosophy 101

Pretty cool. I keep saying that this is a win for open standards and Meta probably does this to appease EU regulators. It's no surprise that this happens as Threads launches In Europe.
- Yep, can't wait to be able to personally defederate from them, I hope that option comes soon.
  
  I see it as an opportunity to tell people on Threads to leave Threads and use an open platform, such as Mastodon, instead. Then eventually Threads will shut down, because everyone moved :D
  
  You mean as instance blocking? Because the Lemmy devs have stated that it's not going to work the way everybody's assuming it's going to work.
  So far the way that it's been laid out it'll only block communities on that Lemmy Instance, users will not be filtered.
  That's ignoring the fact that Lemmy's blocking system is already flawed in it's design and isn't really an effective tool against malicious users.
  So we really shouldn't treat blocking even of instances as personal defederation, because it isn't and unless something really changes and Lemmy's development it never will be. You can on Mastodon because Mastodon's blocking system is much harsher as well as the fact that federation highly depends on following, but lemmy works much differently and also has a significantly weaker blocking system (I should also add it does not respect mastodon's blocking system) so because of that being able to block instances should not and cannot be considered an alternative to defederation, especially when it comes to malicious instances.
  
  Why would you want to defederate at all? It’s akin to hiding your head in the sand, except done on a community-wide scale. Just because you can’t see the nazi over there in the bushes doesn’t mean he isn’t squatting there, observing you.
- Agreed. Instances always have the option to defederate with Threads should it prove spammy or ad-filled or socially awful, but I'm cautiously optimistic that Threads will pave the way for a more open social media paradigm in general. Decentralization is a core tenet of Web3, and everyone started focusing on the block chain and Bitcoins and whatnot but there's so much more to decentralization than that.
  
  Why in the world are you cautiously optimistic? What would give you the idea that meta would do anything but what's in their shareholder's interest. My biggest question is, do we know if activitypub is secure enough to keep them out of its software?
  
  Though this is more federation with a wheel and spoke model than true decentralization where each pier communicates with other piers directly. Each have their place for sure, but they cannot be interchanged because they are not the same thing.
- Pretty cool at first glance. Not so cool when they have pulled in enough users and then remove the federation.
  
  They have orders of magnitude more users than all Mastodon instances combined already.
- I'm looking forward to federation. My stance on it is that I don't want to use Threads, but I want to follow and interact with the people who do. Best of both worlds like this.

no

I wouldn't be too worried about Threads joining the fediverse.
They had the perfect opportunity to dethrone X with a superior app but have given users the most barebones piece of shit that doesn't even have support for hashtags or trending topics.
Mastodon has this functionality.
Last time I booted up Threads, my feed was flooded with e-girls posting twerking videos. I don't follow any such accounts on Threads nor Instagram and I don't like it when my social media feels like a softcore porn platform.
- it's also doing a lot better than Mastodon because they integrated it with Instagram

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think this is actually a great thing for Mastodon. The truth is the majority of people are just never going to sign up for a Mastodon server as they stand today. The majority of people want algorithmic feeds run by a central entity. I know the people here don’t want that, but that’s what the majority of people do want. Will I use Threads? No but if this breathes more life into Mastodon and exposes more people to the concept then that is a good thing. Being able to use a client of your choice to interact with people on something like Threads is also a very good thing. The alternative is a completely closed social network like Twitter.
I know, I know “embrace, extend, extinguish”, but literally this is the best that we can hope for unfortunately. The alternative is everyone goes and uses a closed system.
- Google the history of xmpp. This is exactly the same.
  It's not a good thing.
  
  So we can let Mastodon die on the vine or chance it dying? Ok, I know my choice.
  It’s not like the majority of people are already on open protocols. I’m sure Threads dwarfs Masrodon usage just as Twitter and possibly even BlueSky.
  IF Mastodon was dominate I might have a different view but it’s not. If Threads federates then there is an opportunity to push people to other clients which make switching to a Mastodon/ActivityPub server much easier. That’s literally only upside. It’s not like the people on Mastodon now are going to leave it for Threads.
- What is the obsession with numbers? Centralization mentality is the problem. The idea that unless 5 Billion people are on a network will it be “successful” denies the joys of effective and sustainable networks. I really honestly wouldn’t want to see a fediverse server with more than 100K daily active users. I would rather have 10 instances of 10K active users.
  Meta and those billionaire centrists can go fuck themselves.
  
  I wouldn't call it an obsession, but there does need to be a critical mass of users before a social networks become useful.
- I simply don't trust meta, they have incredibly bad precedent.
- I'm not sure. Might be a great thing, but Facebook might equally be the equivalent of a whale landing in a small pond, killing everything else in the process.

I wish they wouldn't. Stay a walled garden.

I don't see the issue. For all those concerned about privacy: you know you are posting in public space? Anyone can scrape the posts however they want. Which is a key aspect of openness btw.
On the other hand, by leaving Threads in would show other companies the concept of a global community instead of multple closed groups. The companies could save on moderation costs Reddit-Style that way, but open.
- You need to learn your Internet history. It wasn't so long ago that we had a diverse, interoperable community of instant messaging platforms based on XMPP, an open, federated protocol. Anybody could host their own XMPP server, and communicate with any other XMPP server. Then in 2006, Google added XMPP support to their Talk app and integrated it into the Gmail web interface. But there were problems:
  First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing. They were not implementing everything. This forced XMPP development to be slowed down, to adapt. Nice new features were not implemented or not used in XMPP clients because they were not compatible with Google Talk (avatars took an awful long time to come to XMPP). Federation was sometimes broken: for hours or days, there would not be communications possible between Google and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers, posting irregularities and downtime (I did it several times, which is probably what prompted the job offer).
  And because there were far more Google talk users than "true XMPP" users, there was little room for "not caring about Google talk users". Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.
  Only a few years later, Google would discontinue Google Talk, migrated all their users to Hangouts, and decimated the XMPP community in an instant. Most of the Google users never noticed, outside of some invalid contacts in their list.
  That's why everyone distrusts Meta. Even with Threads being a relatively unsuccessful platform by commercial social media standards, its active userbase still dwarfs the entire Fediverse combined. There's absolutely nothing stopping Meta from running the exact same playbook:
  Add ActivityPub support, but only partially
  Add new features to ActivityPub without consulting with the rest of the Fediverse or documenting the extensions, degrading the experience for everyone not using Threads
  Entice Fediverse users to migrate to Threads--after all, why use Mastodon or Lemmy when 95%+ of ActivityPub traffic originates from Threads?
  Deprecate ActivityPub support after most of the Fediverse is on Threads, leaving it smaller and more fragmented than if Threads had never federated at all, while forcing everyone who migrated from another Fediverse platform to Threads into an impossible choice between abandoning the vast majority of their contacts or subjecting themselves to Meta's policies, tracking, and moderation
- Meta cant be trusted. Ever.
- threads is centralized
  
  If it federates with ActivityPub, it won't be.

I was here when EEE started!

Ok, so what is actually the main argument people have to preventatively defederate with Threads? I perhaps haven't thought about it much, but I don't personally see the problem if my instances would federate with them. I'm mentally comparing this to email. If I ran my own email service, or used someone else's, why would I want to block Gmail, or icloud, or Hotmail/Outlook?
Of course if they don't have effective admin/moderation policies and actions then, yeah they should be blocked or limited. The same holds true with email federation.
- The owner of the server I'm on wrote a nice post describing his reasoning https://about.scicomm.xyz/doku.php?id=blog:2023:0625_meta_on_the_fediverse_to_block_or_not_to_block
  
  Thanks, that's actually precisely what I was interested in reading. That admin team totally rocks for motivating their decision with such a comprehensive argument.
  
  That post is outstanding and is a wonderful writeup that highlights the danger of associating with a company as morally bankrupt as Meta.
- There is concern that Threads will use embrace, extend, extinguish to depreciate the ActiviyPub protocol. Essentially, they adopt the open standard, expand on it with proprietary additions, then when everyone is using the modified standard they drop support for the open standard and now everyone has to play ball by their rules.
  
  I'm also worried that due to content moderation policies, Threads might choose to federate only with a few handpicked mastodon instances. Thus provoking a huge increase of users in these instances because they want to interact with people on threads and causing a centralisation issue, because people will start joining this instances far more than the others.
  It would also render useless self hosting a single user instance for yourself.
  
  Ah, yes that is a fair enough concern. Thanks. There are lessons in the fate of XMPP (and HTML with IE I guess?). However ActivityPub seems to have so much more momentum than XMPP ever had. This makes me more optimistic about Fedi.
  Also, unlike with messaging which is much more dependent on a small number of people you interact with, I think microblogging is much more personal. If Threads would join, grow big, and then defederate 5 years later I may miss out on following some people but that still wouldn't make me leave Mastodon. I left Twitter after all.
  Still, it's a reasonable and interesting concern.
  
  Is it so much of a problem if the rest of the fediverse doesn't follow suit. Most of us and the original devs are here because we don't like mainstream social media and the direction it's going.
  So sure threads can show up and start trying to call the shots, but I think if we only except them if what they do is in our best interest it will be fine as we can just break off again and do our own thing if they start trying to head the project in their own direction.
  As I don't think most people on here care whether threads is part of the fediverse or not.
  My point is they only have power if we go with what they want, and due to the open source nature of this just because they have money and a lot of employees doesn't mean they can take control.
- The content on threads are utter garbage. I have tried to get on with it but it doesn't seem to work out for me.
- I think the issue is that on most people's feeds, the vast, vast majority of the content that they see would be from the @threads "instance." Think of how salty people get about the size of mastodon.social or lemmy.world are compared to other instances, and multiply that along with the threat of a poison pill in the form of corporate embrasure.
  Culturally, the fedi is pretty anti-corporate, so a lot of members are suspicious of centralization / partnership with corporate entities. Though this lens, I think the objections make total sense.
- It's honestly kind of irrational. The "embrace, extend, extinguish" stuff is on shaky grounds as a framework as it is, but it wasn't even part of the conversation until people started trying to retroactively justify the knee-jerk rejection to Meta.
  So it's mostly "we should grow the "fediverse" into the new universal social tool. No, not like that".
  But hey, here we are. I'm on the record saying that I'll mvoe instances if they join to keep them available.
  
  Isn't the entire point of these platforms and the nature of federation is that they get to decide who they federate with and when, and even why?
  
  EEE was the first issue folks brought up when threads was announced. It's always been apart of the conversation.
  
  what wrong with facebook rejection
  
  how is irrational

If true, I would expect this link to work, but it's 404 at the time of this comment:
https://mastodon.social/@zuck@threads.net
- https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/111576825980285552
  
  I'm surprised @zuck@threads.net isn't one of those select few accounts.

Testes nuts.

Idk if this is a good thing or not lmfao

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Joining the fediverse — the decentralized world of social media that includes Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other services that all interoperate through ActivityPub — has been on the Threads team’s to-do list since the very beginning.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri told The Verge in July that he believed decentralizing the platform was key to making it relevant to a new generation of creators.
Skeptics have long held that Threads would never actually federate, even as Zuckerberg, Mosseri, and others at Meta kept promising they would.
For the largest and most centralized social service on the web, suddenly throwing open the gates to other platforms seemed like an unlikely pivot.
This test appears to only cover one small part of a truly federated social network — it doesn’t sound like you’ll be able to post from Mastodon to Threads, for instance, and you can’t move your account between services.
But the test at least reaffirms Meta’s commitment to ActivityPub and to being part of the broader open social web.
The original article contains 344 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 52%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

nooooooooon
- Noon?
  
  It's settled then, meet me by noon at the church.
  
  non

Honestly I think this is good for the fediverse.
It instantly boosts mastodon and Pixelfed’s reach, which means people won’t dismiss posting there as it never gets seen.
I would never open a Threads account, but it unlocks seeing content from a lot of people I like who ditched Twitter but didn’t understand mastodon.
Yes, this can also be Embrace, Extend Extinguish, but I’m happy for the publicity.
If people don’t like it they can join an instance that defederatrs from Meta and that’s totally fine.
- This sounds like it’s NOT going to increase mastodon and pixelfed’s reach
  it doesn’t sound like you’ll be able to post from Mastodon to Threads
  It looks like they’re only pushing right now, they’re not allowing Threads users to pull content in from the broader fediverse. Threads content gets exposure on Mastodon, but not the other way around.
  
  Tbf, that's just in regards to the current tests. It could change later on.
  
  So it seems like they're just doing it to push their posts onto instances almost as advertisment. Not a great practice, seems very spammy to me.
  
  Because the integration isn’t finished yet.
  
  Ah, that's unfortunate.
- It’s funny how “mastodon is too complicated” stops when the instance they pick is Threads.
  🤔
  
  People who say that are generally talking about the signup where you have to pick an instance. And then there's the worry over which other servers yours federates with. If you isolate your attention to a single instance, then all those worries go away.
  The same already happens on the fediverse in regards to mastodon itself. A lot of people discuss the fediverse almost wholly in terms of mastodon.
  
  threads only has one instance
- more content isn’t better content
  
  And that's why all social media is bad.
  Look, open socials can either replace closed socials or be a niche little fun exclusive club for techheads exclusively focused on Star Trek and Linux and how open socials should replace closed socials. You can't have both.
  So if the conclusion here is that popular social media sucks... yeah, you're right. Because all social media sucks. The content won't be better if the same people join Mastodon than if they come from Threads.
  
  I don't agree at all here. If someone on threads has posts you like, you can follow them. If not, you won't see any posts from threads on your feed.
  Your feed will either be the same as before, or better than before.
  
  No, not always, but there are people I know I like and respect and used to follow on Twitter that are on threads and I'm not.

I'm not exactly sure where, how or why people would join Threads, but if it's going to be part of the fediverse I wouldn't be all against it.
I probably wouldn't join it, but I think it would be better for the Meta-users to be exposed to the internet outside of the environment controlled by Meta.
There's a reason why everyone is angry on Facebook. Hint: It isn't that everyone is angry. It's because "engagement" is encouraged.
If they were exposed to a place where people could choose more freely to engage with anger, they'd be surprised with how little people actually respond to shit/rant postings. It's perfectly fine to rant and shitpost, but the fediverse definitely shows that there is more to the internet than that. I won't mind giving it a shot at showing them. (As long as I can block the entire thing at any time I want.)

Anyone using Threads who can tell how does it goes?
Edit: I believe no one it's using Threads LMAO.

I think Zuck is for real on this one. He funded the Diaspora team back in the day after all.
- I'll believe it when I see it
  
  Fair.