Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
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I think E/E/E is still a risk. If some “high follower” type people start joining Threads, and people on Mastodon start following them and making that content a big part of their feed, those people are not going to be happy if Threads accounts suddenly disappear because Meta make arbitrary, incompatible changes.
Hopefully it won’t actually extinguish Mastodon/the Fediverse, but it can still do damage.
IMHO this is 100% the plan. If they play their cards right they stand to take out two birds with one stone (heh). They’ve already paid celebrities to be on there.
Still, this can only happen if Threads gets massive enough relative to the rest of the fediverse that the incompatibility doesn’t hurt them equally.
…that is to say, it’s all pretty likely, unless other strong competitors show up with ActivityPub support.I don’t think Meta really gives a shit about the Fediverse. They are hoping to take out Twitter though, and the Fediverse could be collateral damage.
Exactly, They don’t give a shit about Fediverse.
So why using acticitypub at the first place?
Marketing and content boost for the start maybe? Mastodon has come up a lot recently (hell, even in local radio), so Meta can use this to promote their own product. And already have content right there for users joining Threads, it’s not a blank slate.
After the initial boost and when sucking up millions of users they can just defederate and have their Facebook (or rather Twitter) 2.0.
Extra data to scrape through their servers.
Probably partly to avoid regulatory scrutiny. They can say they’re not being monopolistic (even though they 100% are) because they’re embracing open standards.
That’s why they’re not launching in the EU.
They’re already over 2 million in like 2 hours.
It’s not gonna extinguish the fediverse in the same way nobody leaving reddit joined Mastodon as a replacement. They’re technically compatible, but these are entirely different styles of sites we’re talking about. Lemmy and Kbin are gonna keep on trucking regardless of what happens to the Twitter-likes.
But they’re definitely going to try and kill Mastodon/similar through social engineering. Everybody’s favorite content creators, organizations, and brands will be on Threads, not Mastodon, and when they lock it down we’ll lose access to them and end up needing a Threads account. I don’t understand why anyone trusts this company won’t try to secure market dominance and then monopolize it. The guy says “we’ll just be right back where we are now,” but this could easily decrease the Mastodon population by pulling away anyone who doesn’t care about federation or open source and just wanted a decent Twitter alternative.
Exactly, Jabber got worse after Google defederated, not the same as it was, because people that did not care about decentralized network jumped GTalk. I suspect majority of current mastodon users don’t care about it either and won’t want to stay on the empty network.
Except that I don’t need a Twitter account so I won’t need a threads account either. But I do not, in any way, want to interact with a meta owned product and don’t like the idea of them being involved in the fediverse.
I think the people that value being on a decentralized service will stay on a decentralized server. The people that would abandon one platform to follow their favorite “high follower” poster are normies that never cared about what service they were using to begin with. Meta may absolutely take a large share of users to their platform in the future if they shut off federation and our favorite celebrities and shitposters are no longer visible. But I don’t really see how that is any different than Twitter currently having all the celebrities and high volume shitposters. We already can’t see them. The EEE argument just strikes me as sour grapes that “their” users are going somewhere else. And I’m on the fediverse (both Mastodon and kbin) so I see the value here. But I’m not going to get angry that normies don’t want to put the effort into learning this ecosystem when they have their own lives and struggles and a limited number of social causes to care about.
Now what does bother me is Meta having an outsized influence on the development of the protocol of ActivityPub. We’ve seen something similar to this with Google using Chrome to push some additions to how browsers handle HTML standards/elements, like supporting DRM.
All I can say is that, I started using Jabber before GTalk federation, but ultimately Google made me leave Jabber.
What actually happened is that some friends who originally were on Jabber switched to GTalk, because later Google added it to Gmail, making it more convenient.
So essentially when they defederated, my network was pretty empty.
Why didn’t your friends return to Jabber once GTalk locked them out?
Because thats not how human nature works. Convenience tramps everything and almost noone is as ideologically driven as they think they are.
Then the only real solution is to disallow big companies from making convenient products. At some point the onus has to be put on the average user. Throwing your hands up and saying “the normies are too stupid to consider their own self interest” may be true but it is also an unsolvable problem if they choose to never put any thought into their own lives and problems.
My point is that we shouldnt enable those big companies even more than they currently are. We shouldnt let them into our own garden. This is a lemmy.world thread, i didnt even know that, i am using kbin. Tomorrow, this might have been a threads thread and i might have not even noticed it. But if for x, y, w reasons, kbin defederates from threads one day, i will notice that most of my feed will have 0 content all of a sudden.
Taking stuff away is a very powerful motivator. We will end fighting human nature. While if we never federate with threads and naturally grow the rest of the fediverse, this wont happen. It’s easier to grow a garden amongst other gardens than to grow it next to a skyscraper.
If this is how it will play out, then we’re already doomed. Meta will throw money at the platform until everyone you want to follow is there, which will leech fediverse users until there are only the hardcore users left.
The solution to that, which I would fully support, would be for kbin, lemmyworld, etc to deferate from threads from the beginning. You can’t lose something you never had and personally, I don’t want to interact with a meta owned product so the prospect of what you just described bothers me. If lemmyworld doesn’t defederate from them I would 100% move to another instance that does.
Edit: So there is actually a pact for instances to sign pledging to block meta and I don’t see lemmy.world on it. That said, it’s a long list and it’s manually updated so I may have just missed it. https://fedipact.online/
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Because GTalk integrated with Gmail and with ability to still having access to other friends was much more convenient and they didn’t care about who owns their favorite instant messaging network. And majority of their friends were also on Google.
The truth is that only purists will stay, and most people (even tech people) don’t give damn about being locked out.
Google also broke things in a subtle way. You could see the person is online, if they messaged you you would get their message, if you messaged them, your message would show as delivered, but never get to them.
So first thing you thought that maybe they are just busy. When you started suspecting something is not right then it made you think that maybe there’s an issue with Jabber etc
I don’t think the defederation was ever announced, it was more like a bug that was never fixed.
The people that would abandon one platform to follow their favorite “high follower” poster are normies that never cared about what service they were using to begin with
Thats now how things work. Let’s say that now you are following people from fediverse. Those people are motivated to post things, because someone needs to, because they want to grow the community, etc. Meta joins, then meta people post a trillion things(because they are a trillion people, some of which might even be paid by meta). Those initial fediverse people no longer post things because “they have already been posted”.
Then you defederate meta. Congratulations, now you have 0 content and 0 content submitters. You will start to start from the beginning, from an even worse point than we are atm. You are now dead.
Very few people are as ideologically driven as they think they are. Ultimately it is about quality of life. And maybe you can tolerate some junk because of your ideology but everyone has their limit. Content is king, not only for the “normies” but for everyone. What is the point of a fediverse that has nothing to interact with and noone to interact with you?
Then the fediverse was only a temporary stopgap until Meta (or any other corporation) made a better product than Twitter. It was doomed from the start.
Big companies can do whatever they want. But we are enabling them to do it easier if we federate with them. When i joined reddit 15? years ago, it wasnt that dissimilar to the fediverse. Of course it is even harder now to replicate the thunder in a bottle that reddit was and to scale but still.
The culture may have been similar to fediverse culture, but the underlying structure was nowhere near similar. It was just as much a private site run by (benevolent) dictators.
The thing is that this can happen even without active malice.
If the product owners or engineers decide “hey, we want to add this cool feature, but it’s not supported by activity pub” the path of least resistance – bypassing the long process of changing the activity pub spec and getting everyone else on board – can be super tempting, and come from a place of wanting to make your product better.
Those ostensibly good intentions can lead to E/E/E without actively meaning to.
You could argue that this is what happened to Jabber.
Although Facebook Messenger never made a good faith attempt to interoperate with Jabber in the first place.
It was Google’s GTalk not Facebook’s Messenger.
Facebook never needed Jabber for their messenger.
It was both, but Facebook Messenger was less widely known and was kind of janky. here’s a source that explains part of what was going on.
Ah I see, so they never federated with XMPP. This would be comparable if they would take Mastodon server and build Threads from it, but never connected it to the Fediverse.
GTalk used Jabber to help bootstrap their I’m then stole part of Jabber’s user base.
EEE was my first thought on seeing that threads would federate, so I felt a bit of relief when I looked at the op just now and saw that Rochko directly addressed this, then I read what he said and it doesn’t seem like he addressed it at all.
Yeah, I don’t find his answer on E/E/E comforting. However if nothing changes hopefully the niche that’s already on Mastodon and kbin/Lemmy could survive regardless of Threads as I’m fairly happy with the state it is right now.
Google effectively killed XMPP this way. During the time the federation was working the protocol essentially stood still, because they were afraid of breaking GTalk. Once GTalk gained enough momentum Google just pulled the plug.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
They didn’t even address what will happen when Facebook starts aggregating data from instances federated with Threads:
- Vote/Like data
- Follow relationships
- Text sentiment analysis
- Behavioral patterns
- Periods of activity
- etc
Heck, not only did this post not address it, it seems like they tried to downplay it.
Facebook is an analytics company. Even if it’s not mission critical to the function of Threads, they will scoop up data sent to Threads, they will use it to create profiles on every single non-Threads user they can, and they will sell that data.
It doesn’t even matter if it violates privacy laws; the laws are toothless to companies as large as Facebook. They’ll just be made to pay a fine and carry on as they are.
Yes, interoperability would be a win, but not when it comes from a company that has routinely demonstrated they abuse every crumb of data they can get their hands on.
What should happen? That’s all public information, they can (and probably do) scrape this already. As does all and any AI project and company.
But it’s probably not legal for them to sell it. The fact that they’ve tricked us into thinking this is normal is part of the problem.
Meta isn’t really in the data SELLING business. It’d be counterproductive to let their competitors have access to all the data they do - it’s what keeps their advertising network competitive. Same goes for Google. They don’t want third parties to have access to your data, they want to be THE company that sells targeted advertisements.
Sell it in bulk to governments for large sums of money for which advertising isn’t their interest.
Oh what makes you think governments need to pay for that? Is free if you’re a big enough market.
I’m surprised that they pay for it. They could just demand it through all kinds of national security laws.
If it’s public information why would it be illegal? If I understand correctly the only thing stopping anyone else from doing it as effectively is Meta’s ability to aggregate the data and find the buyers, and perhaps morals.
If the fine it’s less than the profit they will do it anyways.
I’ve posted this elsewhere in the thread so hopefully it doesn’t feel spammy, but this is from their privacy policy:
"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
to research and innovate for social good.
Oh fucking please. What a total absolute load of rat shit, my dear fucking lord.
Simple enough, based on their TOS we just block their instance and they can no longer create a profile/scrape our data. Anyone know how to go about that? If so, lemmy know
So Meta can gather your profile information, likes and follows, as long as you instance federate with Meta’s instance and somebody follows you? Are your likes and follows available through the public api? If they are not publicly available then the federation with Meta gives them an easy access to you information
What’s worse their privacy policy states that they believe that being connected to their network gives them the right to monetize your data (messages, boosts, likes, and follower graph).
jfc read the article. He addresses that.
I am assuming you are referring to Eugene’s post. The way he addresses it is actually fairly misleading. The Threads privacy policy explicitly states that they believe they have a right to monetize any data on any nodes connected to their network.
Isn’t all of that already available to Meta (and anyone else) via the web UI anyway? They don’t need to be federated for that, they can just use a web crawler. And I assume they are.
Frankly, there are other instances out there that I’m more worried about than Threads.
Why use a crawler if you could spin up some camoflaged small instances and get the info right via the regular api?
Or create accounts and get the info from the client api like apps?… running a crawler would be far easier than running the largest instance in the fediverse …
I’m not sure about Mastodon, but at least for Lemmy, not every piece of information is available from the API or web interface. Some of it is only sent through federation. Namely, who, specifically, voted for something, edit history, probably a few other things.
Does Mastodon just hand over a complete list of everyone who liked a post? Even if it has thousands of likes? That kind of data would be very valuable to a company like Facebook.
They already can, everything you do on Mastadon is already public.
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It is legal. It’s all public info, anyone can scrape it.
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The new internet will be in the woods in the middle of nowhere dancing naked on mushrooms! It’s the only place corporations won’t follow
You jest but that’s exactly what it should be
No jest, it’s already one of my favourite activities
Stop giving big corpo any more chance at 3E saying “no this time it’d be different” no the outcome is the same every time.
Meta is a socially transmitted disease. There’s no reason to “wait and see” with Meta, we already know them. Meta is not new, it’s Facebook, with a new name and a fancy new logo to deflect attention away from all the terrible shit they do and have done, to individuals, groups, communities, and society as a whole.
So much terrible shit that unlike many Wikipedia articles that have a “controversy” section, Meta/Facebook has entire pages devoted to their terrible shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_emotional_manipulation_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal
There’s more. Meta is not some new and exciting player in the ActivityPub field. They’re a known quantity, and there’s nothing to gained by allowing them to flood the Fediverse with low-quality shitposts at best, massive social manipulation campaigns at worst, and everything in between. In my humble opinion.
EEE, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Meta may very well be embracing federation concepts to eventually return back to their former selves.
I’m no fan of Meta or their practices, to be clear. Though I do think there are potential benefits in having the ability to communicate cross-platform, so long as some reasonable safeguards are put into place. I’m firmly in the camp that doesn’t believe that Google killed XMPP because XMPP was never a popular or widespread protocol prior to GTalk, and the users who came and went when Google did what they did were Google users, rather than XMPP users. So much like Eugen here says, it went back to how it was before they got involved.
That said, I do think that Meta in its current incarnation is an entirely different animal. I suspect that early on in a post-federated world, we’ll start seeing dark patterns intended to lure users to Threads. I’m envisioning registration gates similar to paywalls on news sites. “This content is available exclusively on Threads! Click here to register your account!” type stuff. More sinister, there’s nothing to stop Meta from appending advertisements in the body of posts created on Threads. Hell - they could go full evil genius and suppress that they’re doing it entirely on their own platform since they’ll have some other ad delivery mechanism there, which would mean the only people being served those ads would be federated users OFF of Threads who see or interact with content created on Threads.
So while I’m not a doomsayer about Threads and federation, I do think that we as a community are going to have to make some decisions about how to handle them. Having access to a community the scale that Meta will produce isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And because of how Lemmy / Mastodon / KBin / Fediverse apps work, we as users will always have the ability to control what we see in our feeds. At worst, it makes /All/ less usable, which is admittedly quite a big loss given how useful it has been to get subscribed to worthwhile content since joining Lemmy. And obviously, some instances will elect not to federate with Threads at all, which gives users choice on the type of community and content they want to interact with regularly.
With some care, likely some effort around defining usage rights for user generated content, and some new content control / filtering capabilities yet to be developed, I think that these networks can coexist in a way that is mutually beneficial to a degree, but if not - defederation is a click away.
Generally well reasoned and interesting, but, the only thing that defends against EEE is
ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
Ima guess that Meta’s support and brand recognition dwarfs Mastodon’s, not re-assuring and rather self absorbed imo.
Ima guess that Meta’s support and brand recognition dwarfs Mastodon’s, not re-assuring and rather self absorbed imo.
Yeaaah, when I read this I was just like, “Have you been outside of Mastodon lately? The brand’s not so great to those folks that have heard of it in context.” Nearly every time I’ve seen Mastodon come up outside of Mastodon, it’s to complain about it being confusing or only used by tech nerds and there’s nobody worth following there.
And I personally like Mastodon, but there’s no denying the brand’s not reputable to many folks, and it’s probably still relatively unfamiliar/unknown to a majority of folks that don’t closely follow social media stuff.
The problem is that Mastodon’s brand is absolutely nothing and Eugene has been very resistant to popular features. He’s forgetting that the ways in which Mastodon are opinionated are not very popular even among Mastodon essentialists.
As has been mentioned before, Meta can scrape most data from the Fediverse already as it is publicly available.
One strategy could be to default to publish to followers only, and not public? It would be a great loss for the open web, but it might be a necessary one to make sure blocked instances do not get access to most of our data.
Another solution could be to publish all posts under a Non-Commercial Creative Commons 4.0 license, which I assume would legally block Meta from using our content in any context as they earn piles of cash on mixing user generated content with ads. Not sure if they would respect it, but it might give us an option for a class lawsuite in the EU?
Actually the copyright option might be the best one. Theoretically speaking the instance would need to state that all work is licensed only and that every comment and post has the copyright retained to creator/OP.
It’s just a simple tweak of the terms of service, but that would be enough to do it. Getting them to respect it is another ball game, because as we’ve seen with Midjourney and other photo apps, they have clearly scraped photos with watermarks that they didn’t have access to, and have used them to both train their models, and in the final output. This is why there was discussion of a class action lawsuit, although I didn’t hear where that ended up going.
I’m hoping that this happens irrespective of other steps that may need to be taken with respect to Meta or other corporate interests in the Fediverse. Since the data is all completely public, it would help clarify “ownership” of original content, allow for meme culture and virality to continue to occur, but still give some avenue for people to raise claims against these large entities.
Someone is eventually going to try to marry a blockchain to this tech so that there’s an infinite record of content with receipts to the beginning. Privacy concerns all over the place, but it seems like such a natural extension to the already completely public nature of the content being generated throughout the fediverse.
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The Mas.to admin claims to have “blocked Meta’s domains” already. Maybe that could prevent the scraping? Maybe not.
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Calling Eugene Mastodon’s CEO is kind of a threat. Granted he is Mastodon GHmb’s CEO, but by no means is that what most people think of as mastodon. Then again he’s let the #twittermigration go to his head.
Thankfully I haven’t seen this, yet, from the lemmy.ml guys, the fact that lemmy.world is already bigger probably helps that too. (Well that ant they, allegedly, anti-capitalists).
I’m admittedly unfamiliar with Eugene, so was using the title listed in the blog post.
He was talking to Meta before they announced Threads and he signed an NDA. I strongly agree with @[email protected]’s opinion that the recent popularity Mastodon has enjoyed has gone to his head.
Put plainly, I don’t trust him at all.
You don’t have to. He might have developed Mastodon but it’s all open source, and he certainly doesn’t “own” ActivityPub.
yeah, I wasn’t referring to you, but to the author of the article.
I feel like he’s out of touch. There are many concerns: our data; embrace, extend, extinguish; and lastly, our communities. Meta has already proven in the past few hours that threads are not different from anything else when corpos drop. Within a few hours, accounts like Libs of TikTok, Gay Against Groomers, and other LGBT harassment accounts joined and are still active. Is this what we really want federating with us?
What does spam/abusive use have to do with Threads specifically.
Also, can you justify your concerns? You just stated a few words without saying why it is a concern. This article did a pretty good job of not only stating the same concern words you used, but why the fears are a bit overblown.
Poor moderation certinly has something to do with it.
I don’t know the others you mentioned, but how is libs of tik tok a ‘harassment’ account?
Are you fucking serious? Do you genuinely not know who Chaya Raichik is? Because if you’re acting in good faith and actually aren’t aware of the vile hatred and harassment orchestrated at her hands, you really need to drop her name in the old Google machine and do some reading.
How is the account harassment? How does the account harass people?
I don’t really care what kind of a person anyone is, the question is how the account harasses lgb people
The account is specifically for mocking people, thus the name. They take someone to direct their hate at and that translates to real harassment. It’s built to hurt people, especially LGBT people. Groups built on “destroying the woke mind virus” are a scourge to humanity.
It’s very… basic. One timeline, can’t filter anything out… ton of garbage. No thanks. Holy shit it’s bad.
I don’t know about everyone else here, but my social media use involves me actively trying to avoid The Algorithm™. I subscribe specifically to what I want to see, and actively avoid everything else. You can’t do this in the Threads app. So this is why I’ll be using Trunks or Megalodon over the Threads client.
Every social media platform, UseNet, BBS, and forum – and the planet Earth itself – has had it’s clique of garbage idiots, off in a corner, doing garbage idiot things. They’re inevitable. They’re even here on the Fediverse – in our own precious instances – already. If you don’t engage them – don’t follow that person you hate the most, or sub to the community that stands for everything you hate – things are actually pretty nice. All of this defederation talk feels extremely short-sighted, and is just going to torpedo the Mastodon platform we’ve started to come to enjoy.
If anything, the public declarations of political & social allegiances via choice of instance could just torpedo it all, and attract the trolling idiots like flies. But, we’ve already opened up that can of worms.
Yeah I’ve been taking a similar approach, to social media. I’ve avoided the algorithm.
I mean, I don’t really do social media in the usual sense, never had Facebook, nor Instagram. I did have a Twitter account but I used it to follow certain accounts and didn’t tweet, so it was basically an RSS feed. I used a 3rd party app and only saw my subs, no ads, no suggested/promoted posts.
Same for Reddit, used a 3rd party app, no ads, no suggested/promoted posts, I only ever read a feed of my subs.
My Reddit and Twitter subs/follows have been mostly hobbies, niche areas of interest, products I own, sports etc. no politics or news discussions. So I’ve really avoided being exposed to most of that toxicity I keep reading about.
This is why losing 3rd party apps was a big deal for me. I don’t want to read sponsored/promoted/suggested posts or ads. I’d rather not use the service at all if I have to.
That’s why I’ve fully moved to Lemmy and Mastodon.
And half of the feed is people talking about how addicted they already are.
Paid promotion I’m sure — if not, sad that people are admitting they are “addicted” so far.
Umm…read the article.
I did already.
I’m preemptively defederating from Threads. But I’m not necessarily opposed to refederating in the future, if Meta proves benevolent. Some bigger Mastodon admins are going with a wait and see approach, but as the sole admin of a small instance, I’d rather not have to rush to defederate if shit hits the fan.
Seems reasonable to exercise caution. Plus, unless you have the means, it’d be a tough spot to deal with resource scaling without knowing what the volume of new traffic will look like.
As a small instance, defederating from Threads could do more harm than good. Denying users access to a potentially large amount of content could cause them to move on.
If you’re concerned about them slurping your content, don’t be. They can just easily set up an instance at billjoejimbob.com and slurp it indirectly. They very likely already are.
I doubt people joining small instances would miss any content from FB/Instagram/Threads/Twitter
The content on reddit is huge but I cut the tie and happier with Lemmy.
Honestly, I’m kind of bummed that so many people are stomping their feet and saying they don’t want the big guy to find their little cabin in the woods.
If mas.to – where I signed up for Mastodon – defederates Threads, I’m just going to lose access to the vast population that will simply use that easiest means of joining the Fediverse.
Defederating is just going to chase droves of people off independent servers and into the arms of Zuck.
You’ve completely missed the point. It’s not that Facebook (and by extension, their users) will connect to Mastodon, it’s that they will take over Mastodon, seizing all control for themselves, and coopting the existing userbase.
Right now it’s a separate product. Just like people know that Twitter is not Mastodon, Threads isn’t either. If you want to reach Twitter users, you get a Twitter account. If you want to reach Mastodon users, you get a Mastodon account. Facebook is planning to market themselves as the best way to enter the Mastodon ecosystem. Before long, they will be the absolute dominant server. Then they will have control, because defederation is a weapon they can wield and not vice-versa.
This is not theoretical, either. Google did the EXACT same thing back with Google Talk and the XMPP protocol. And we know how Facebook operates, so we know that this will eventually happen. The only way to stop it is before it starts - Facebook users need to be unhappy (at Facebook) that they can’t reach Mastodon users, so that defederation remains their own problem.
(Separately, I agree with you that Lemmy needs to become more accessible to the common user. But simply handing it all over to someone as awful as Zuck is not the way)
It’s going to be an arms race to make sure free software provides a better service than Threads does, and that people know about it. We can’t be satisfied with unpolished diy software for nerds any more.
This might be a very pessimistic take, but I strongly feel like any average Joe will rather pick the Meta/big corp alternative to the FOSS one. The fact that Meta’s got a reputation for Facebook and Instagram while Mastodon’s got a reputation for being confusing is… very not promising. Basically I feel like this is a lost race already. Hope it’s just me.
Lol Meta has a reputation for stealing data, denying genocide, platforming bigots, and interfering in elections. The idea that the name Facebook wasn’t so toxic that one of the largest tech companies did a massive rebranding in the wake of major scandal (see threatening democracy) is a fantasy.
And that’s precisely why the worry, because there is no chance in hell that fediverse can provide a better, stable and more feature-filled service than an established multibillion corporation like meta.
I think the only problem here is that Eugene has shown absolutely no interest in developing that way. I think that’s what feels so silly about this whole post, he’s forgetting that the ways in which Mastodon are opinionated are not popular even among Mastodon essentialists.
The only way they co-opt the existing userbase is if everyone defederates from them and people who need/want a bigger network have no option but to move to Threads. This is what happened to XMPP and we risk doing it to ourselves this time around.
I’m not saying no instance should defederate. There are good reasons to avoid them. But if there are no independent instances federated with them, Meta dominates the space by default and without anywhere else for its users to go (unless they want a smaller network and know about the existence of defederated instances).
Ignoring everything else, they absolutely intend to collect and sell your data regardless of whether you use or interact with anybody from their service:
"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
Yes. But they’ll scrape our Mastodon info whether they’re federated or not.
Probably already are.
It does either way. As you said defederating threads makes an instance not viable for you. Many people might think that way. This defacto lessens decentralization and increases vulnerability to an eventual takeover.
And defederating threads has the issues you mentioned. Both comes with problems and in the end it might split the fediverse.
Or am I missing something?
But the other side of the coin is that if they don’t defederate, my instance remains completely viable. I will continue to happily chug along on mas.to in my Trunks app.
If we federate now (i.e. don’t actively defederate), even the normies will learn early-on that they can sign up on a non-Threads instance & use a non-Threads app, and not have The Algorithm crammed down their throat like it is now on Threads. And they can still see Taylor Swift or Paris HIlton or whoever’s posts, if they choose. Additionally, if they see non-Threads content up-front, normies have something to be upset about if Meta splits from the Fediverse in a likely inevitable dick move. And if our first move isn’t to chase every normie off a non-Threads platform, there will be stuff they actually value not-on-threads-dot-net.
If we defederate from the beginning, normies don’t know what they’re missing, and they don’t care about non-Threads instances. Anything not Threads fades into obscurity as more & more people trickle away to where the content is. And we just make the doomsday Meta takeover actually more possible.
I think both scenarios are absolutely possible and possibly huge have up and down sides. I just hope this cool place we got here will survive and stay cool. I find it impossible to predict what will happen at this point. Some instances will block meta and some won’t. Which is the nature of decentralization and the thing instance owners should do. Decide for their instance and the people on it what they think is right. People can then leave or join instances that align with their ideas. Shit is going to get real soon around here.
That’s not how people work. If they start from Threads, very few will switch to a 3rd party client. And defederation will happen anyway once Meta gets control, it’s the whole point of EEE.
You do have a point though- Threads could be a threat to Mastodon even completely isolated. A lot of current Mastodon growth isn’t because of its draw as a product/platform; it’s simply people people leaving Twitter for something else. Threads will also be a something else, creating meaningful competition
Most of what I followed on Twitter was RSS feed type stuff from websites. And a few gaming/tech journalists – people who are generally not awful.
When Elon bought Twitter, the journalists were falling all over themselves to go somewhere else: CoHost, Mastodon, whatever. Almost all of them have bailed on those platforms and reluctantly gone back to Twitter, because their livelihood is dependent on them having visibility to the masses.
Last weekend with the tweet view limit announcement, there was a wave “here’s my Bluesky account” tweets from those same journalists who came back to Twitter. But that runs them into the same wall they had with Mastodon. Almost nobody actually uses Bluesky. In this case, because Jack just won’t let the normies in; rather than due to lack of interest or inability to figure out the platform.
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if they do, you can just folow them for here right? Or does lemmy.world have less features than kbin.social?
Maybe I’m completely misinterpreting it… but my impression is that if my Mastodon instance defederates Threads, then I cannot interact, in any way, with anyone on Threads from my account on the defederating instance.
I’m on mas.to. The admin already publicly stated that Meta invited them to talks. They declined. And they even blocked Meta’s access to anything mas.to before Threads was even a thing. Defederation is probably a foregone conclusion there.
Threads being federated fascinates me. In one hand, it ends up being a gateway to mastodon / Lemmy for some. People who grumble about how “evil” Twitter / Facebook is but use it anyhow because “that’s where everyone is” may at least have their toes dipped into those concept and some of that may now see leaving as a viable option to something that isn’t evil as long as they can still see that content. It’s still seems to early to tell.
They might dip their toes in at first. But then you’ll have 9 out of 10 big communities/users on Threads (or probably 99 out of 100 if we’re realistic). And at that point if Meta defederates nobody of those users will care. Threads will become Twitter 2.0 and be its own thing, while Mastodon will be crushed with a tiny user base in comparison (which will get even smaller because most content is on Meta servers, so users switch over to Threads).
I think it will depend on the type of community, whether “the main one” ends up on Threads.
Stuff like FOSS communities will actively avoid threads. It’s just like hipsters avoiding mainstream whatever V2. We’re seeing that same scorn in these threads.
Stuff like “what’s Taylor Swift up to today” communities… 100% threads based.
Really, the only things I think the current Mastodon userbase would care about losing if Meta pulls an inevitable dick move and splits Threads off Fediverse are corporate things.
I’d wager that I’m not the only one who still keeps a Twitter account so I have access to customer support on Twitter for product & services I use. Because, lets face it – customer support on Twitter is almost always better than waiting on hold via the “official” support lines. Those same channels of communication will 100% start showing up in Threads.
Our software is built on the reasonable assumption that third party servers cannot be trusted. For example, we cache and reprocess images and videos for you to view, so that the originating server cannot get your IP address, browser name, or time of access.
I hope Lemmy also implements the image/media caching in the not so distant future. Currently, Lemmy Web UI sends a lot of HTTP requests to external servers like imgur. (Github Issue)
I didn’t know you could move Mastodon servers and retain your followers. Very cool.
Nice to see a balanced opinion, this whole facebook/meta discussion has been pretty virulent at times
