Technology

will be able to follow my friends, celebrities, artists and interact with them when federation is activated

Yea and then they'll either defederate, or purposefuly break some interoperability functions. But since "everyone" will be on Threads anyway, you'll just move there too.

It's happened before even with Meta itself. Their messenger was xmpp compatible. Oculus didn't need a fucking Facebook account.

You can say that everything will just get back to how it's now, but it won't. Right now, Fediverse has momentum. Twitter and Reddit are imploding. People have reason to pay attention, and potentially move or expand their online presence here.

Once Threads has a billion users and they cut the rest off, who will care about some tiny competitor? How many Instagram alternatives are you aware of?

Imo, we should welcome users from threads and see how it goes.

People are welcome. Meta isn't.

I don't know why it's so controversial to keep cancer away in the first place, and not wait until it spreads and kill you.

I think you'd let a polar bear into your house to see how it goes, given the chance.

I, as a mastodon user, will be able to follow my friends, celebrities, artists and interact with them when federation is activated

This is exactly what's scary. You might wanna check out this blog post about Google and XMPP, which is another federated protocol. Google Talk used to support XMPP, to the point that so much of the XMPP user base were Google Talk users. Then, Google Talk started implementing Google Talk specific features that other XMPP clients did not support. Yes, it made Google Talk more feature rich, but it then made regular XMPP users out of the loop. Then, the final nail in the coffin was Google Talk dropping XMPP support. Suddenly everybody's friends who were using XMPP to communicate just... went offline as far as GT users were concerned. Then of course, Google killed Google Talk. This is EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) in a nutshell, and any time corporate interests enter projects like this, you're at risk of this happening.

Don't get me wrong, the fediverse could use some upgrades, more resources, more users. But I just don't trust Meta to have the fediverse's best interests at heart in the way. They're a corporation, one of the biggest in the world, and they'll only ever care about what benefits Meta.

There is a whole lot of, "the leopards won't eat MY face" in here.

I think it's ingorantly optimistic to think meta hasn't spent more money than you make in a lifetime on strategy alone to marginalize the rest of the fedi-verse in an attempt to increase profit and destroy competitors. If you think Mastodon can figh that on donations bless your heart.

I understand a lot of people are mad at me for posting this. I just wanted to share my thoughts. That is all.

I think that activityPub is different from what happened with XMPP. XMPP was a niche product at that time so after Google stepped out, only a disrupted niche reamined.

Here we are a lot of users on our own. If meta starts to do their own implementations of features too difficult to replicate (EEE) or they decide to stop using activityPub, we'll be fine on our own again.

Anyway, https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Actually, after reading that Threads already has liek 10M users and even some bigger creators joining, I decided to just remove threads.net from my blocked instances list. When threads comes to europe, I'm pretty sure most people will switch to it from Twitter and this means most of my friends and creators I like will also be there and I can just follow them through my instance

My thinking is, if the normies weren't motivated enough to move to Mastodon after Musk's shenanigans, this isn't going to move the needle very much, either.

To them, they see it as "hey, they're making something that's kind of like Twitter, but I don't have to create a new login, GREAT," and not look into it any further. I can see a very marginal percentage that could be curious, but not enough to be that noticeable.

If more normies actually cared at all about protecting their data, it'd be a different story.

Whoa, the amount of downvotes is staggering. I agree with you that it doesn't feel right to see many instance admins defederates with thread from the start. EEE is a threat, but fediverse is already has known by normies as mastodon and has strong culture behind it. I think fediverse will live as usual even when meta decided to stop federating.

Personally I do not see them access to their network ad-free. Maybe there is some data extraction value in outside people interacting with their users but I just don't see it.

The amount of crying about threads is just ridiculous. We have a wonderful open future ahead of us. We have to learn to deal with everyone joining us. That is how great this open system is.

The fediverse is overreacting in a hysterical manner with the Meta federation. Unlike the https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html article suggests, XMPP is a bad comparison, because the protocol itself was destined to fail, to quote tapoxi:

I was a weird XMPP nerd in high school and tried to switch friends from AIM. So here's my experience.

• Onboarding was difficult. There was no obvious choice of server or client to use.

• Adding friends was difficult. You needed to send a subscription request to a contact, and they needed to send one to you. If anything happened during this process, you couldn't chat.

• Popular XMPP clients, like Pidgin, also supported the other chat services (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc) so people just continued using those.

• Network effect. You need to convince a mass of people its better, otherwise nobody's using it because no-one uses it.

• No obvious benefit to the user. It's decentralized sure, but there weren't many improvements over AIM that people actually used.

• A lack of good iPhone XMPP clients`

It also struggled with proper handling of multi-device setups with synchronization. There is a reason why XMPP is gone and we have WebRTC, Matrix and others instead, even on the open source side of things.

And the Microsoft Office analogy does not hold up, its data format pretends it is open, it is no open software anyways.

Mastodon made it clear they will not accept venture capital, the corporations cannot highjack the development of Mastodon. If anything we will see forks like the Star Office, Open Office and Libre Office situation in the far future.

I also would like to keep communication channels open to most other instances and networks and will leave those anti corporation blockers. You are not going to tell me with whom I may interact. Keep the invasiveness to a minimum to not flood the network with hateful crap. People looking for designated safe spaces with limited scale communities have otherwise brilliant opportunity to do so.

It is totally wild how people think an instance could be possibly toxic and apply that to Meta, and Meta alone. The entire fediverse must be distrustful, because anyone can hookup. With the recent growth I see more and more drama of immature instance admins throwing tantrums who their users are allowed to interact with, because of some astrological misalignment as with the mastodon.art drama. As an instance admin, you have the role of an ISP, you are not a community mod. Know your place.

lemmy.world itself is the "Meta" of the Threadiverse thanks to its gigantic size alone, speaking of EEE. There is already a "rogue" fediverse in the form of the right wing gab.ai etc.

We will end up with about a dozen huge instances and the rest will have barely any relevance as with E-Mail providers. But it will be still diverse and big enough that EEE is not going to happen.

I honestly agree, I feel so annoyed that on a platform designed from the ground up to enable communication whatever platform we're on, people are taking the first opportunity to cripple its growth because they hate a company.

You can get whatever data is available from federation with a server just by joining a server - the data they want is from installing their app on your phone.

if you stay federated with them you can get all their content for free without installing their spyware.

complete win.

Eugen is off his meds. He's content for Mastodon (and all other ActivityPub peers) to stay niche apparently.