As you've probably heard, Threads (a fairly new social network from Facebook's parent company Meta) is testing integration with the fediverse. Depending on how you look at it, it's a great opportunity, a huge threat, or both!
Back in May and June, when Threads' first announced their plans, there were quite a few polls on Mastodon about people's reactions, most showing opinions split roughly equally. How do people feel today?
Definitely not. The same reason back then as it is now. Namely: I don't trust Meta to not try to destroy the fediverse
I'm skeptical anything good will come out of it, but I'm glad if I'm wrong. Meta is about making money. The fediverse is a direct competitor to everything and anything they do. I don't think Meta is interested in integrating with the fediverse. I think they want to dominate the fediverse. But that's just me.
The fediverse is a direct competitor to everything and anything they do. I don’t think Meta is interested in integrating with the fediverse.
Right and this is really all that even needs to be said. There is nothing meta can do or say that will make this not true and there is no possibility that overtime meta won't make decisions according to this power relation.
The future fediverse we all day dream about when we are in an optimistic mood is literally a catastrophic fail state for a corporate social media company like meta. We see the plot of a happy uplifting family action movie, meta sees a horrific slasher movie.
Capitalism believes selfishness is a virtue. And capitalists believe they are a benefit to society by being as selfish as possible. Anything good that comes from them is purely accidental.
That said, them connecting to the federverse is a much bigger risk for threads than it is for the federverse. We came here purposely to not be subject to them. They have no power over here. And next to none of us will ever be enticed away from here to there. However they cannot compete with the currently failing Twitter. And they need the dedicated long-term engagement. They have decent numbers. But only because they're pulling from a pre-existing user base. That isn't really interacting.
The main thing is to not get stuck in a self-destructive rhetoric cycle. Like people did with Google talk and XMPP. No one used Google talk for XMPP. It was just a nice side effect for a while that they interoperated. When Google closed it off they did not kill XMPP. XMPP still exists, and those of us that used it were weirdos in the first place who still used it afterwards. Threads may have a little something to offer. But we will lose nothing if they leave.
was no
still is no
Threat.
Whatever the stated reasons for joining the fediverse might be, the actual reason is to enhance data scrping capabilities.
It's silly to think they can't scrape data from where they are though.
What's to stop them from starting a tiny instance, getting all the data, and just keeping quiet about it?
The threads people are already happy to have given up that data, and if meta becomes a problem, defederate from it, or find an instance that isn't federated with meta threads.
Which of the above sentences is supposed to make me think that it is impossible for Meta to scrape more privacy destroying data, if they go all in on the fediverse?
Any data they can get from federating, they can get much easier by just scraping it. If your goal is data harvesting, implementing ActivityPub is a huge waste of money
I still feel strongly against it.
I’ll possibly end up leaving the Fediverse and finding a nice forum where I know corpos will never ruin.
No need to leave the fediverse, just join instances which plan to block threads
Nah won’t work.
Threads will kill content from non-Threads users.
I'm so disappointed that it isn't an overwhelming majority of votes against federating with Meta. How do most people not realize this is just their chance to take advantage of the fediverse? And like haven't we heard enough bad things about Meta to avoid them?
I am extremely against federating with Threads.
Their goal is pretty standard affair.
isn’t threads already several times larger than the whole of the “fediverse”?
For me personally there are two main forces at play here:
I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don't use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.
Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it's a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.
I don't really know for sure, but I'd have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty fucking narrow. We'd be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it'd also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it...
So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.
I'm perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I'm willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).
From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.
From a cultural standpoint, I'm also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc.. Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase--and that's the Fediverse working as intended, imo.
I don't like meta as a company.
But I don't want to exclude a bunch of people just because they decided to use a server owned by meta. It's not like the server is a community dedicated to hurting people or promoting hate speech or something, and I don't want to punish people just because they're not savvy enough to understand the problems with meta. Let them federate and just don't follow any of them if you're not interested in any of them.
Defederating isn't going to benefit us or hurt meta, it's just gonna hurt the people who use threads.
But I don’t want to exclude a bunch of people just because they decided to use a server owned by meta.
I do.
Your word choice is just bizarre. Nobody would be excluded, they'd only have to make a profile on a different, normal server. And nobody would be "hurt" by not having access to Lemmy's memes about Linux and similar stuff.
just don’t follow any of them if you’re not interested in any of them
Except that theoretically my "All" feed would still be full of garbage-tier content that people typically expect and post on Meta's services, and that userbase with its same mindset would eventually spill over into the communities that I do follow too.
Defederating isn't going to benefit us or hurt meta, it's just gonna hurt the people who use threads.
...Good. they should move their happy asses to a normal, non-ghoul of a corporation run mastodon server, if it pains them so.
I hope they federate
why do you hope that?
I hate Reddit and Twitter both so I want the Fediverse to take off
Facebook/Threads will not be a good federation partner, same cesspool as Twitter.
do you hate facebook
Meta are war criminals. Period.
If you support Meta attaching to the fediverse, you are welcoming war criminals and their quislings to becoming part of the fediverse.
I sincerely hope most of us in the fediverse are better than that or I'm going to have to search for a new social media home.
Meta has been a willing tool for enabling war crimes, genocide, political manipulation/propaganda, and brutal authoritarianism all across the globe.
Meta has a very bad track record, but on the other hand I would be happy to be able to follow famous people that are only on Threads from my privacy-respecting services.
I see Threads federation something like an RSS feed. It's not inherently bad per se.
Does anyone know a decently sized mastodon instance that's defederated from Threads? I need to move from mastodon.world which wants to wait and see what Threads does. I moved to mastodon to get away from mainstream social media and I don't want any of Threads content in my feed. So please suggest some instances!
You can simply not follow people on Threads and you will have no Threads content in your feed
Doesn't posts that people I follow boost that's on Threads also show up?
I don't see how it's a threat. They can't take over the whole federation.
Sure they can. Like Google took over XMPP.
More awareness is always good to take. That's said my own personal instance will defederate because damn meta
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy