When Meta launched their new Twitter competitor Threads on July 5, they said that it would be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon, and all the other decentralized social networks in the fediverse "soon".
But on July 14, @alexeheath of the Verge reported that Meta's saying ActivityPub integration's "a long way out". Hey wait a second. Make up your mind already!
From the perspective of the "free fediverse" that's not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is "a long way out" is encouraging. OK, it's not as good as "when hell freezes over," but it's a heckuva lot better than "soon." In fact, I'd go so far as to say "a long way out" is a clear victory for the free fediverse's cause.
Itโs almost as if the entire point of Threads was to use the Twitter hate to harvest more personal data with zero interest in creating an actual longstanding platform. ๐ค
Threads is pretty blatant about censorship and sharing of user data. They use terms like "a friendly space" and "convenient" to sell it to users. So you're actually losing something by jumping ship from Twitter. The one positive for Musk era Twitter was an attempt to reduce censorship, but the crazy things the company did otherwise far outweigh it.
One of the shitty things profit driven social media sites do is curate content to create a more advertiser friendly space. It even extends to special interests and government interests. I mean what do you call that when public information is curated by the government. I sure as hell don't want my US government telling me what I can and can not discuss in a public venue.
In the USA there's a little thing called the first amendment. Granted these are companies and don't necessarily have to adhere to civil rights in the same way government agencies do, but in effect they're doing the same thing. The US government should absolutely not be coercing these US companies into censoring content, which they are.
I think it makes entry into the EU easier, but they're receiving headwinds on two fronts there. There's no need for them to implement federation if they can't overcome the other regulatory hurdles first.
Yep. Federation could conceivably respond to the EU's requirement for interoperability -- and they could do it in a way that puts a lot of barriers to people actually moving, so works well for them. Of course the EU would say that didn't meet the requirement, which would lead to a multi-year legal battle and eventually Meta would probably pay a billion dollar fine (as they routinely do -- it's just a cost of doing business) and promise to remove the barriers (which they wouldn't, and then there would be another multi-year legal battle).
But none of that works if the EU won't allow Threads for some other reason!
Still, my guess is that they'll figure out a way around the EU's objections to Threads ... we shall see ...
yeah, they'll need to fix a lot of their permissions if they want to get into the EU - which is probably a much higher concern than some piddly mastodon users.
I still don't get their target audience for Threads.
Facebook users don't want to leave their weird boomer Internet bubble. Instagram users will continue posting pictures on Instagram and advertise their linktr.ee account where they link to their 18+ content because they're not allowed to link in directly from Instagram, and ๐ users ... well ... they will continue using ๐.
Ironically the only ones wo really care about Threads is people in the Fediverse.
I think they may have realised that federating whilst they're still not allowed to operate in the EU would hand hundreds of millions of EU users to independent instances.
Called it. I'd be prepared to bet that in a few more weeks, Meta's just gonna quietly drop the idea of ActivityPub integration all together. To me at least, it always seemed like the whole "planned Fediverse integration" for Threads was just them trying to jump on what they saw as the latest buzzword bandwagon.
Had Threads been released a few months earlier, you can bet they'd have been talking about "Metaverse integration" instead.
Every โmainstreamโ (ie: not tech focused) source I have seen discussing threads has been keenly missing the whole federation component and focused on it being a twitter replacement competition.
The whole federation thing is probably too abstract for most.
I don't trust them either, and they're very likely to move ahead with federation anyhow. It still means something that they're changing the story that they're telling.
Honestly this is why the whole โMeta will kill the fediverseโ thing people were saying never really convinced me. They just donโt seem to care, I mean itโs been a month and they still have no real plans to actually federate.
A month isn't very long, they haven't even figured out their basic features - this was more a "maybe later this year" timeframe. It could be done quickly if they decided to start by reproducing mastodon and going from there, but building something that federates but is highly monetizable takes time - honestly they were probably pleased by the numbers and decided to go for monetization first
Making it clear they are unwelcome was the point though.
It seems they've put the idea on the back burner after we largely made our position clear, but it's not unlikely that they try to quietly federate down the road... Every time they think about it, we have to make them believe this would be more trouble than it's worth
I personally believe that Meta never intended Threads to be support Activitypub and just chose it so they could do the bare minimum to comply with the EU digital markets act.
I keep seeing this article posted to scare people, but Lemmy and Mastodon aren't in the same situation as XMPP. XMPP had barely any users outside of Google Talks, with the overwhelming majority of interactions on XMPP being between Google Talks users. Google was tying their product to a public standard that they couldn't develop however they wanted, all for compatibility with very few users. When they pulled out of using XMPP to develop their own platform, the sheer lack of users on XMPP outside of Google Talks became apparent. This will not be the case with Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/ect. Mastodon has 10 million registered users, and Lemmy has hundreds of thousands. The majority of both service's users are not about to switch over to sell their soul to the Zucc, so if Facebook federates for a while before defederating, Lemmy and Mastodon will have as large and robust communities as they have now, and the services will live on unlike with XMPP
I think the u/Kes put it really well. People on fediverse platforms are already staunchly opposed to big tech so they have no reason to leave for platform made by Meta of all people.
If I donโt want something to happen, Iโd much rather a corporation say โa long way outโ than โnever going to happenโ. Something on the back burner of a corporation is as good as dead. Something an exec said no to just needs a change in leadership to make happen.
Euuuuh...
Is it me or is some parts of the article setting up/opposing LGBTQ+ against non-lgbtq?
"One of the interesting dynamics of the discussion so far is so much of the resistance to Meta has come from queer and trans people, and that most of the loudest supporters of Meta in the fediverse are cis guys."
This sentence may be technicaly right, but it's sooooo stupid mostly interpretation.
Edit: wrong and uncalled for
Starting from there, the article seems to be as much about "us va them" than threads and meta...
Unless I'm mistaken, if you remove the LGBTQ community everybody that left... Is cis persons.
As in general "techy" world, most of the person using fediverse (and it's currently changing rapidly, which is good) is male.
I may very well be mistaken, but the way this sentence is constructed make it feels like one information is being phrased in a way that fitting a certain point of view.
Without activepub integration, I just see threads as another Twitter. I don't think any of these walled gardens are very interesting, especially Twitter copies such as Mastodon or Threads. It's just another platform for the few to get their message out to the many. It's boring in almost all cases.
Called it. I said this last week when everyone was still hysterical about blocking Meta:
Everyone is talking about defederating preemptively because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it's much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can't just copy Twitter - it has to be "Twitter, but better". So, doing what any exec does, he looks for buzzwords and trends to make his new product more exciting. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta's standpoint, they don't need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I'm sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
I reminded of the end of season 1 of Foundation, where the Foundation stayed hidden from the empire for a long time, growing in strength and technology.
And from the perspective of the "free fediverse" that's not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is "a long way out" is encouraging. OK, it's not as good as "when hell freezes over," but it's a heckuva lot better than "soon."
Threads seems to have achieved its immediate strategic goal of setting fire to zombie Twitter so that it'd stay dead; building it into an actual Twitter replacement could take years, and in the meanwhile there's plenty of time for Mastodon et al to keep hoovering up users too.
Personally, I don't post anything on Threads, and haven't really tried to obtain any followers there, but I do log on and view/like content from famous people I used to follow on Twitter in the hopes that if they get enough engagement on Threads they'll cut out Twitter altogether.
Threads seems worse to me because it is Meta, requires an app, and can't be look at without an account. At least Twitter has restored visibility to people without accounts and now Twitter front ends are working again. Everything in meta has seemed to be account based with Instagram and Facebook where if someone sends me a links is usually useless since it requires a login. And I'm not creating a meta account. Even tiktok can be viewed without an accoubt or app.
At one point they opened their messenger system and allowed XMPP clients to connect. This worked absolutely fine, and chatting in any XMPP compatible client was possible.
But it was also possible to OTR encrypt the data so Facebook only got seemingly random character strings that are absolutely useless for data harvesting and profile analysis to sell to advertisers, so they closed down the messenger and disabled the XMPP bridge not long after they opened it.
Same will happen here: As soon as people start interacting in a way it is not possible for the company to track everything, they will stop allowing it.
On a personal note: I will defederate from Meta as soon as they establish their ActivityPub bridge (it of course will only be a bridge, or does anyone really think they would base one of their main features on an open standard?)
Not at all. I talked about this in In chaos there is opportunity! Meta's potential arrival is a likely to be a good thing for the fediverse no matter whether or not they actually go forward with it.
It was always pointless. If Meta or anyone tries to join Fediverse, there is no stopping them. There will always be some instances that will federate with them.
What Lemmy needs is an instance wide blocking system, so users can themselves decide which instance to block.
Actually I still think meta doing activity pub would be overall a good thing and a win for all of us. Users should decide what will be the best platform for them to use, free from any content locking reasons.
Meta being able to create completely new social network overnight and still getting more users then entire Fendiverse without the need to open up anything... That feels more like a loose for me.
hi, anti-Meta person here: it's not about how many users we have. it's about Meta's long track record of insufficient moderation and harvesting of personal data. thanks to their almost nonexistent moderation, they've facilitated genocides, let deadly disinformation spread unchecked, and contributed to the rise of fascism. and they harvest enough data from their platforms to create digital duplicates of us, and if they join the Fediverse, of course they're going to harvest data from anyone federating with them too.
would you trust them to play nice in the Fediverse after all they've done?
Mastodon does not broadcast private data like e-mail or IP address outside of the server your account is hosted on. 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. A server you are not signed up with and logged into cannot get your private data or track you across the web. What it can get are your public profile and public posts, which are publicly accessible.
I just want to make this clear I'm also anti-meta and that's why I want them to feel a need to open up for users to make it easier to switch platforms.
I would trust them as much as any other new instance of any other platform that joins the Fendiverse. That's my point.
Users should decide what will be the best platform for them to use, free from any content locking mechanisms
Meta being able to create completely new social network overnight and still get more users then the entire Fediverse without the need to open up anythingโฆ That feeler like more of a loose for me.
Meta didnโt spin up a new service overnight; itโs integrated with an Instagram. The reason why they were able to get 100 million users in a few weeks is because they have a pre-existing user base... do you really think that Meta will give up their users so easily? The users that they make massive profits off of? If so, what makes you think that your local instance would have the resources to work against Metaโs billion dollar marketing budget to ply away a sizable chunk of their users?
Also, Meta now sits on the ActivityPub W3C committeeโฆ I donโt think that they will allow portable user accounts any time soon, especially if it threatens their profits.
The fediverse is a tool of freedom, morals, ethics, for those that want to be connected, something that no commercial entity will offer. And itโs ok for it to not grow at all costs, or be the widespread available platform. It just needs to be present and faithful to itself.
Yes I read it and I simply do not agree with most of what is said there. XMPP is not dead and saying google killed it on purpose is to much of a simplification.
Worst thing that could happen if we federat with meta and decide on some point that this is a bad instance and block it, is that we go back to where we are now.
But since some governments and news companies already started to run their own mastodon instances it would be easiest for them to just keep up their own instance and federate with threads instead of creating another account on threads.
This plus all de Content created by people from the "free fedivers" would meta bring into a situation where they would want to be federated and therefore would (to an extent) do stuff to satisfy other instances. Our position against meta would be much stronger than how it is now.
So definitely not growing at all cost but excluding all form of commercial use of the fedivers by default would lead to fedivers remaining just a footnote in society without changing anything.
So I want not only meta but all of the big player to use ActivityPup and fighting for our (the users) favor without all their lockin tricks.
Yes by making it like a one-click Join from their other very popular platform "Instagram" and advertising it there.
That's (most probably) why threads is currently not available in the EU. Gatekeeper practices like this would be illegal with the Digital Markets Act. But honestly it would be very easy to get around this. Just make it possible to join without an Instagram account. So I guess there are more concerns from Meta to not fullfil EU Standards than just this.
I haven't heard a single valid reason why federating with Meta is bad. Only people misunderstanding how technology works.
edit: remember pretty much all objections can be solved by personally blocking the domain, rather then forcing it to be blocked for everyone. Also that all the information Meta could possibly get, they can already get regardless because all of our content is public.
The user base on a platform like Threads is probably quite different from that of Lemmy (or reddit) Federating with them means their content is starting to also flood to our platform and in a big way due to their huge number of users meaning that we're getting our faces stuffed with facebook quality content that many specifically is trying to escape here.
Then block their domain. Problem solved. Any other objections that can't just be resolved by personally blocking the domain? Don't ban it by default, give users the choice to ban themselves or not. There's no downside.
They don't need to. There's not any more information they'd get that they can't already get. You realize all our comments are public and scrapable, right? Regardless if they're federated or not, our content is public for anyone to scrape.
I hope this can be a polite argument of different opinions.
Like others said it could be bad for the fediverse in the long run.
If meta joins activitypub they are the only ones that are really winning.
We get access and engage their content, which promotes their network.
They would be the largest node by far and it will give them power to influence activitypub. They can push "features" that only works within the threads network and when they don't work with the rest of the fediverse creating a disparity in the userbase. People on threads will think that we are the ones that are weird for not having them since all users on threads have them and will probably push, "just download threads".
(Kind of how apple controls iMessage and how people get bullied into buying iphones just so they don't have a green bubble, the fediverse is the different one that will need to adapt to meta wishes)
Or maybe they can suddenly decide to defederate, and now all the people that had connections with threads will be forced to download threads if they want to keep those connections. People that would otherwise never had downloaded threads in the first place.
Regardless of the outcome, they join to stay or leave, they are the ones that will win in the end.
This has been done in the past. Its Microsoft " embrace, extend, extinguish" philosophy. A recent example of an open standard is the XMPP being killed by Google. Ultimately meta is a for profit corporation and they have every incentive to monopolize this space.
You brought up the point of people being able to block the domain. The vast majority of people don't change the default settings so the fediverse experience would include threads by default.
Just like how ppl can block meta, and since the majority of fediverse don't really want the connection, if threads is so important for you why can't you sign up on their pratform?
For me, other than my concerns with the future of the fediverse, i also consider is that meta is so bad that threads is not even available in Europe because of safety and privacy concerns and so I want nothing to do with it.
One last thing, meta was supposed to join WhatsApp, FB messages and Instagram direct, meaning from each of those platforms you could message ppl on the other platforms. They haven't even been able to do that yet. They connected FB and Instagram but not WhatsApp yet bc ppl opinion of FB is low enough and the backlash was big enough.
Hopefully I managed to convey my reasons why the federation with meta is bad.
But also, what are the good reasons to federate, like you (just opposite) I haven't seen a valid reason to federate.
As soon as they start pushing features, it's no longer ActivityPub, but a fork of ActivityPub. There's no reason why our fedi clients would be forced to adapt. We already have this weird display issue sometimes, like upvotes and threads on Lemmy not properly showing up on Mastodon for example. It's not a huge issue if it's not entirely interoperable.
That just download threads mentality already exists. If you think it's an issue on the internet, it's 10x more powerful in person. It already exists, it won't suddenly appear when Meta federates. If you make a new best friend in threads from Mastodon and Threads defederates, surely that isn't your only point of contact? If it's that important to you that alternative means of communication isn't viable, then maybe just download Threads if they aren't willing to download Mastodon. That's more of a social issue which greatly varies per person.
I think you're speaking for others when you say it's too hard to defederate for users. For the sake of Mastodon, you just press the three dots and block threads.net. That's very easy UX, no settings involved. Also I can say the same, if choosing to restrict everybody from threads instead of just yourself is so important, why can't you simply press that block instance button? That way you aren't taking choice away from others.
The reasons to federate should be obvious. People. That's the whole point of social media. I don't want to be restricted to fedi users who think they're superior then the average person who uses Facebook. I'm not going to stop using Mastodon either just because I don't like these people. I want to talk to family and friends. I want to invite the people I actually like because decentralization and growing the fedi is good for all. More content the better. That's what social media is.
It's simple. Meta does not do this because they are nice. Their goal is to collect data, grow the Market and remove competitors. This also includes appeasing (mostly European) Regulators by appearing nice.
Don't know how many times this needs to be said. All your content on the fedi is public. There's nothing they can see by federating that they can't already see. Please understand how the technology and privacy works on fedi.