You must log in or register to comment.
This is why I’m in favor of not having await and see policy toward Threads. The safest thing to do is assume they’re lying.
Threads users aren’t Fediverse users. Meta isn’t another instance. Even former Meta employees should be treated with extreme suspicion for years if they try to defect.
Nobody who’s ever worked for “Big Social” should be allowed to touch the ActivityPub standard. It should be obvious that their livelihood goes against what it stands for.
Cool, so pick an instance that plans to defederate with them and you’re golden.
Personally, I think all the anti-Threads stuff is paranoid rhetoric and I’d rather see how it pans out. My instance admin agrees so we’ll see how it goes.
Point is you can choose because that’s the entire point of the fediverse. And it’s why I don’t understand why folks are expending so much energy writing paranoid pieces on this topic when they could just defederate and move on.
pick an instance that plans to defederate with them and you’re golden.
That’s not how this works. This is a threat to the concept of the fediverse. It doesn’t matter what instance any of us picks.
Threads already has hundreds of millions of users. Once they activate ActivityPub, they will be hundreds of times larger than the rest of the Fediverse combined. Instantly we will be a tiny minority of the users of this platform. That will give Meta unimaginable influence over this platform and technology.
I’m not sure I can spell it out more clearly.
No, that’s literally how this works.
If you don’t like an ActivityPub participant you block it. It’s in the architecture.
And given the current fediverse is already a tiny fraction of total social media activity, if a bunch of anti-Threads instances hive off to form their own fediverse subgroup, it’ll basically be a no-op from their perspective. They’ll just keep talking to each other off in a little corner by themselves just like they’re doing today. That’s kinda the whole damn point of a federated architecture.
Best part of the article is a reminder that those who do not learn from the past, are going to repeat it.
I don’t have sympathy to GAFA, but the article oversimplifies the reality and jumps to the conclusion here and there. Broken logic is dangerous…
Edit:
For example,
Since its inception, Facebook have been very careful to kill every competition. The easiest way of doing it being by buying companies that could, one day, become competitors. Instagram, WhatsApp to name a few, were bought only because their product attracted users and could cast a shadow on Facebook.
This is oversimplification. Facebook not only acquired WhatsApp, but wanted access to its user data. So, it’s not “only because” they wanted to control WhatsApp before they become a rival.
The article’s logic becomes sloppy like this every few sentences if not words.
I don’t see any large leaps.
If threads uses activity pub, most activity pub users will be meta users using the meta client. Meta will not feel the pressure to conform to the activity pub implementation. They could add features as they want since all their users will use their client. This will cause a sudden incompatibility and the fediverse will have to be the one to fix the problem.
If the fediverse wants to update the protocol to add a feature, we’d have to run it by meta first since they would have to update their client. If they drag their feet it would be hard to force the update knowing it will disconnect the majority of users from the fediverse.
It’s the same situation described in the article with Google and XMPP.
I don’t see any leaps or jumps. This could be how meta kills the fediverse and we’d be walking into it eyes wide open.
I understand all those points.
I just don’t quite see how that would kill the fediverse.
After all wouldn’t we be exactly where we are now if meta disconnected again?It’s not like you and I would suddenly start using threads if it started federating.
When a big corporation like Walmart moves into a neighborhood it kills the small stores because it delivers most of what people want more effectively. Then when Walmart closes shops to consolidate those neighborhoods don’t go back to the way they were, they now have no stores.
There is a lot of content in the fediverse that wouldn’t exist with meta, because meta users would provide better content, more discussion, and more votes would mean more granularity so better content rises higher. That would stop a lot of the people who post content on activity pub. They would be too late and have too little engagement to be relevant. Those people don’t magically reappear if meta decides that activity pub was just a bad mistake.
I know that you have put more thought into this topic than I did and you just might be right.
But dude that wallmart analogy misses the point by a mile.
Wallmart kills the small stores by simply undercutting them, this has nothing to do with what meta might do.And you didn’t really argue my point that people like you and I could and probably would consume meta content if it was federated.
But why would anyone that is part of the fediverse right now jump ship if meta came and went away again?I damn sure will never create another meta account or use any meta app. Would you?
You wouldn’t create a meta account. But I know I consume a lot more content than I create. Probably 1% of social media users create 80% of the content. If meta joined, the users that make most fediverse content now will see their engagement drop. There will likely not be a good reason for them to post at all since, in all likelihood, that content has already been posted by a meta user or reposted with more engagement.
Eventually they’ll stop posting because it won’t be fun. At this point almost all content will be meta content, and most activity pub clients will be “alternative meta clients” in practice. If/When meta leaves, the fediverse will likely have a fraction of the content it has now, it’ll be a ghost town and have a long and hard road to recovery.
That’s not to mention the other problems in the article.
If meta joined, the users that make most fediverse content now will see their engagement drop.
That’s where you lose me again.
Why would the engagement drop if a ton more users could consume your content.It’s not like the ratio of content creators to lurkers is any better on meta apps than here.
Btw thank you for the good faith discussion, I don’t think that would have happened at the old place.
