- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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.
They might end up being forced to, should Threads decide to revert.
Mastodon users will inevitably hook up on Threads communities instead of fostering their own, and at that point being left to their own devices would be a catastrophe.
And yes, this is exactly what happened to xmpp.
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.
Embrace extend extinguish
Don’t federate with corps, it will only end badly
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.
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.
I honestly forgot Threads even existed.
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.
And the frog could just jump out of the pot before he boils.
Which they do, if you are trying to boil them.
Not in the obvious metaphor I was making.
I’m pointing out the metaphor is false and your argument might as well
Is there a list of instance somewhere that we can pick from? I thought someone was putting together a list.
To see Instances that block threads.net click here
https://fedipact.veganism.social/ lists instances with their decision.
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.
Users on Mastodon can simply block their domain if they want to.
But can’t Mastodon post on Lemmy and Lemmy can’t block instances on an individual basis? That’s the way I understand it currently stands. I don’t want threads showing up in my feed and would like to block them.
yup. And that’s what we did. The majority of people either didn’t care either way or didn’t want to block it. With way more “don’t block” than “block”. So that’s that. At least for now
How many users are on your instance? I’ve never heard of it.
a little over 20 active users
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.
yeah, I get what you mean. But it’s still mostly fitting in the way I feel about it. Basically: users can think for themselves. They don’t need me to take care of the bit scary world out there.
Doing so for a whole instance feels super condecending. “I know better than you what you want. I’m going to block it”
I was here when EEE started!
Testes nuts.
no
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.
Meta cant be trusted. Ever.
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:
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Add ActivityPub support, but only partially
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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
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Entice Fediverse users to migrate to Threads–after all, why use Mastodon or Lemmy when 95%+ of ActivityPub traffic originates from Threads?
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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
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nooooooooon
Anyone using Threads who can tell how does it goes?
Edit: I believe no one it’s using Threads LMAO.
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.
more content isn’t better content
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.
will they go to mastodon
If enough people that they want to follow give them the “mastodon.social treatment” as I’m calling it (which basically means rejecting them based on being on an instance with a bad reputation) they might, they also might not. I know plenty of people who choose to stay on Mastodon.social even though they’re limited by lots of servers and users for spam. Same would probably happen with threads. Though I imagine there will be significantly more animosity towards threads than mastodon.social because threads is not just a bot infested mastodon instance, it’s run by Facebook.
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.
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.
Part of that is only because any and all Instagram accounts are also considered Threads accounts. I have a feeling active users is probably in a similar ballpark
BS. There are 140 mil Threads accounts and over 2 bil Instagram accounts. You can create Threads account with Instagram and for a time they couldn’t be decouple but that changed too.
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
Won’t they have control over their instance though? I’m sure they’re going to run it like Reddit and shadow ban the shit out of their users and also not let them see certain stuff.
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.
is facebook
why wouldn’t you want to defederate
bc there’s people on the other side :)
They certainly have the choice to migrate. If they don’t want to it’s their problem. Fediverse wasn’t meant to be a wide open connect with anyone anywhere unconditionally network, if you want that go to Nostr (it’s filled with Right wing trolls and crypto/nft bros for that very reason). It’s meant to allow for instances to communicate and share content while still being run independently of one another. That also includes the ability to block other servers.
Facebook and the like certainly aren’t filled with right wing trolls and the fediverse is a very niche thing. They have the choice, but they might not even know it.
Read this for an idea as to why people are against letting Meta federate: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
It’s not a cut and dry yes or no for me.
I might be looking at this wrong, so please let me know why if I am, but I don’t understand the argument that Google killed XMPP. The protocol existed before Google and still existed after Google. I assume the number of people using the XMPP protocol before Google implemented it was small. Then for a little while, Google added all of their users into the network who could now message all the “pure” XMPP users who were already there. After that though, when Google left the protocol and took all its users that weren’t using XMPP before then anyway, how did that kill it? Would you not still have the same group of XMPP users who were there before Google? Anyone you could chat with before you could still chat with now.
He already is, this is all open? They will include people’s numbers in their “awesome wave of the future” and I don’t want that. The more people ignore them and isolate them, the more they won’t have power over everyone.
What are “people’s numbers”? What power would they have if we didn’t defederate?
Dude, facebook is evil, we all know that. I have no idea how they plan to take over the fediverse, but they’re planning it. Do you remember when they first announced and then everyone suddenly started calling it the threadiverse? They have plans, hold on to your seat.
What is the worse case scenario for me, a person living on kbin? What the heck could they do to ever possibly affect us when we can just pull the plug on them anytime?
by user @OtakuAltair@lemm.ee
If there’s one company you should preemptively block, it’s Facebook. They have a track record of destroying anything and everything they touch and there is zero reason to think it won’t be the same this time. From this post:
They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
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.