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- cross-posted to:
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I have my problems with Meta, but I’m hoping this will help Mastodon grow
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Do we really want Facebook users just for the growth? Quality beats quantity.
Give them a taste and then defederate…
The good thing about the fediverse is that instances can choose with whom they want to federate.
In my opinion, there should always be choice and people with terrible opinions should be allowed to express them – just like others should be allowed to laugh, ignore and block them. Whether we like it or not, the fediverse includes everything from left-wing to right-wing extremists. But we can choose an instance which excludes all those unwanted posts, just like we’ll be able to block surveillance corporate instances.
bigotry isn’t only difference of opinion
What is considered bigotry often is a difference of opinion though.
Ultimately I think I’ll end up running two accounts
I respect if my Mastodon instance decides to defederate because of a legitimate threat from Facebook, given the company’s consistently awful history.
There will also be some good people worth following who want to use FB’s Threads for whatever reason. If I need to, I can use some special frontend or web browser version to read the content.
So whether we stay federated or not, at the end of the day it’ll be ok as far as being able to see things from the people I care about.
In the meantime, I’m going to bring as many people over to the real Fediverse before people get settled into one or the other
I do. I love my following on Threads but I hate how fragmented social media has become post Twitter. It’ll be nice to follow everyone on one account - mainstream and otherwise.
It should be possible someday
I’d love to skip into the future when all the activitypub stuff is set up nicely. Can’t wait
It’s going to stay good. Right?
RIGHT?!?!!!
I choose to dream
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meta??? more like FACEBOOL (i didn’t mean Facebook)
It won’t be just people, it will be bots mostly.
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I’m sure there are some, there always are, but it will be overwhelmingly bots, and not the bots designed to garner engagement.
Fediverse? Do you mean, the Threadiverse?
I’m being cheeky to illustrate a point - Threads will almost certainly harm the overall health of the Fediverse in the long run, with users relying increasingly more on Threads’ instance[s] to use Mastodon services and connect to people.
This may be a cynical view, but even if that does happen, the core ActivityPub protocol will still be intact and at worst be relegated to a small community of tech nerds, which is to say, basically the status quo.
The core of the software will be intact, but the community will be broken - because once Threads pulls the plug (EEE), instead of a stable community you’ll have a shrinking one.
Or from another angle, they won’t be able to entirely pull the plug. If they try to but users still want to be on mastodon, they can find another way.
That said, I support the immediate defederation with any threads instances.
They can pull it - most users in Threads will be interacting with other Threads users and content. Mastodon will be simply “that ideologically weird corner”, and in practice they won’t miss it.
For scale: Threads currently has 100M users. The Fediverse as a whole has 1.5M.
And I think that will go both ways. I mean, we all already have the option of joining threads right now to interact with those 100M users but I have a feeling most that are here aren’t.
Their joining the fediverse will be more disruptive than their leaving it I think. And that’s not even considering the higher costs to anyone running instances, since all that extra volume won’t be processed and stored for free (though admittedly I am not familiar with the implementation details of how federated content is handled).
Their joining the fediverse will be more disruptive than their leaving it I think
Eternal September-like? It’s possible.
13+ million total users: https://fediverse.observer/stats
I’m counting only monthly active users, for both sides. FediDB lists 1.2M for the Fediverse, your link lists 1.7M of them.
the core ActivityPub protocol will still be intact
Will it though? My guess is they’re working on “fixing it” to what they want 24/7.
When a company uses Embrace Extend Extinguish, they are relying on network effects to drive people to their side. So let’s say Threads comes out, starts federating, has a big established userbase, and then they come out with some new, proprietary killer feature. It could be great moderation tools - something kbin and the fediverse need, no doubt about it - but whatever the feature is, it draws users away from the existing fediverse infrastructure and into Threads. Threads then makes massive changes to the ActivityPub spec, building the walled garden back up again. Only this time, they’ve actually siphoned off some of the users you originally had in the community. The result isn’t the status quo, Meta peeled away users who otherwise would have stayed.
By the way, while a “small community of tech nerds” is perfectly fine in its own right, I would argue the fediverse has already grown beyond that community. They’re a large contingent no doubt, but there’s also law enthusiasts, news outlets, game developers, users from Germany, Japan, France, Finland, and I follow them all. To see them leave for Threads would be a shame.
Isn’t threadiverse already a term to specifically describe the kbin/lemmy/etc. style of fediverse service?
It’s both, it depends on context.
Here I mean a Fediverse that is mostly controlled by Threads.
I think you mean WASN’T threadiverse already a term.
Yes, it used to be. Soon, it won’t be.
Eh, I can see politicians self hosting their own instances from their party or what have you. Same with governments. There is a potential as well that x.com may decide to federate out of survival if it gets too big.
Why would they self-host and do work when they could just use Threads? It’s not like FB gives a fuck about treasonous political parties.
The same reason Trump has his own social network.
Own instances give a lot more control. They can be as outrageous as they like, full on Trumpian, even. They can also control what gets said in that space much more effectively, seeing as how they are the mods and admins. And they don’t have to worry about Meta or Reddit (I doubt Musk even cares) getting media backlash and removing them from the platform entirely.
Sure, Threads can defed from any controversial instances but it will be trivial to create a mirror that effectively refederates the problem instance.
The same reason Trump has his own social network.
Didn’t that only start when he was threatened for being kicked off Twitter?
But the other points for censoring ideas make sense.
Didn’t that only start when he was threatened for being kicked off Twitter?
Exactly. No one is gonna kick you off your own platform, or in fediverse terms, your own instance. The most others can do is defed from you, but that’s easy enough to get around if you’re determined.
Trump being deplatformed, while having good reason, could have likely concerned cabinets and governments worldwide that they may as well “just in case”. Also, having something like “[email protected]” or “[email protected]” seems more legit then “[email protected]” or “[email protected]”. It’s a similar idea why they don’t use gmail/outlook addresses
Keep in mind, I’m talking governments and media organisations. They could likely just ask an intern to do it for them lmao. The benefits outweigh the cost. Even plenty of tech nerds have personal instances.
This is just a guess, but I think that the likelihood of Twitter federating is almost to zero, unless forced by legislations to do so. It simply doesn’t benefit from that, since every group and individual leaving Twitter might as well defederate it, and odds are that the upper echelon there knows it.
Instead I think that Twitter will try to associate the Fediverse with terrorists and what have you, to indirectly smear shit into its competitor Faecesbook/Threats.
This is just a guess, but I think that the likelihood of Twitter federating is almost to zero, unless forced by legislations to do so. It simply doesn’t benefit from that
That, and Musk’s ego won’t allow it.
Tides change. I think federating tomorrow is definitely off the table. Heck, even next year. But if the Fediverse balloons more and more, they may have reason to.
Seriously, how does that dude manage to look so inhuman? He looks like someone pretending to be human and trying really hard, but missing that one last bit.
That one’s a classic.
The trick is to always be faking empathy.
And I would assume he chose that picture too. It’s not as bad at full size, at least he has some color to his skin and doesn’t look like an alien methhead as much.
is requirement to be billionaire
Nope. Please fuck off, thank you.
So the hate for this is now gone and replaced with praise? What happened to all the posts about how this is an attack on TNT frediverse when Meta first announced this integration?
My stance is still a hard fuck no to Threads entering the fediverse.
Edit: My reasoning can be read in my old comment here. It’s all still applicable in regard to meta/Threads federating.
There’s no logical reason to give them the benefit of the doubt or have unrealistically positive expectations given their overwhelmingly consistent track record.
The way I see it have them show through actions that they won’t EEE for a good few years with whoever is willing to risk it. If they don’t show any signs of EEE then, I might reconsider my stance on federation with them. Until then I’ll keep threads.net on the blocked list of my instance.
Oh there’s hate, there are a lot of unreasonably, pro-threads upvotes and comments making the rounds.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out 99% of them were written by ChatGPT or whatever FBs equivalent is.
There does seem to be some real voices and understanding with some of the comments, so probably a mix of paid and chabot. If chatbot is that good, we are really in some serious trouble.
For 3 to 4 sentences LLMs are indistinguishable from humans.
You don’t start noticing the idiosyncrasies until it gets a bit more repetitive and loses coherence during longer texts.
That’s so not good, I hope there are people working on ways to tell.
Hopefully, researchers are working on ways to detect these subtle differences.
It’s always an arms race, and I fear it’s near impossible to detect LLMs from just a few sentences. Longer texts, sure, but how often are the same few words written in a short social media comment?
Is it really so bad that people (or rather instances) are allowed to choose who to federate with? Currently instances with spam and other unwanted commenters get constantly defederated with. Threads will just be another one of them, while some people are happy to get more content. Or am I missing something?
Edit: I read your point about EEE and the destruction of the community, but we currently also have multiple communities here on lemmy which are quite extremist and mostly blocked. I’m still not convinced people who currently use the fediverse will switch to Threads. But maybe I’m too optimistic (altough XMPP largely died with Google defederating, other systems like matrix show that there’s still demand for federated messaging).
To be clear, I want it to be users deciding on Lemmy too. Also, people already here moving to threads wouldn’t be the problem, we’re small in comparison to them. It would be a few things:
- They would bring in a huge party of users that would take it over and overwhelm the current users. It would be like a cruise ship of tourists taking over a small town and breaking everything for the current residents.
- They could post to Lemmy, but we can’t really post to Mastodon. They’re going to send ads our way disguised as content, guaranteed.
- If they can manipulate the users from Mastodon, it’s going to get out of hand fast. They have teams of devs and psych engineering to accomplish that.
- This is volunteer ran, do we have enough energy to fight Meta when they try to enforce something?
- Can they manipulate Activity Pub software because we’re a small team of devs? If they can, they will.
- One person mentioned them having instance owners sign NDAs. What’s up with that?
If they are having instance owners sign NDA’s they must have pre-selected who to talk to or only target Mastodon because feddit.de just pre-emptively defederated threads.net after users made the owner aware of the news and it’s one of the largest instances (even more so if you go by MAU which is arguably what Meta would be intersted in).
That’s OP’s opinion and some users here, but I don’t praise it and I don’t think it will be good for fediverse in the future. People will start using Threads app since they can interact with other fediverse instance. And there will be more drama and more toxic content just like on fb, twitter, tiktok and ig.
This is even more concerning
I will consider to stop using lemmy…
I will consider to stop using lemmy…
There are always other instances. Threads is one of the only two domains that my instance blocks. Even the second largest instance, lemm.ee, and the original instance, lemmy.ml, have blocked Threads.
Also, considering how little even Mastodon users interact with Lemmy, you guys will see close to nothing of them.
already defederated
Threads is making its first moves to EEE the Fediverse.
What does this mean?
Thank you
I keep seeing this nonsense take. Please tell me how Threads will EEE a federated social network? It would take adoption and compliance. Whenever I see people put this take it tells me they don’t trust people of the Fedi and they don’t believe in the Fedi. Threads can’t force any implementation on the Fediverse. If Threads does anything that those that attempted to give it a fair chance doesn’t like then it will be blocked. It will be no different than Gab with the exception of it having more of our friends, relatives and people we like to follow
I’m sure this will fall on deaf ears, but here. Threads is lacking in content. Threads gets fediverse content. Instagram promotes that content, getting people to sign up and actually use it. This includes big name content creators and celebrities, authors, journalists. People on mastodon and the fediverse get used to that content. Threads starts supporting some new features or longer length or who knows what in threads. These posts are either omitted from the fediverse or are degraded to be fediverse-compatible. This annoys fediverse users who have gotten used to all the content they are now missing or seeing degraded. A significant number of them move to threads.
And on the content creator side. Threads gains a huge market share. Content creators on mastodon get used to all the threads viewers threads decides to add enhanced security or formatting requirements or some other nonsense that regularly stops mastadon creators’ content from being seen or interacted by threads users. Or threads starts heavily deprioritizing mastadon content. Either way, the mastadon creators decide to go where the audience they got used to is o threads leaving mastadon behind.
Or something more clever than either of those. Because we know meta would want to EEE if they can and there are people who will be cleaver at doing it.
That makes no sense. Since September Threads has been near 100m users. They don’t need the users from Mastodon nor the Fediverse. A good number of instances have already blocked Threads and are against big platforms. This falls under my point that people don’t trust the people here, if you believe people will be enticed or get “used to” content enough to go to Threads you are stating you don’t trust them. People can downvote me all the way, yet no one came out with a reasonable rebuttal to what I said. I believe in the foundations here, defederation and others. Threads will already be insanely massive. It’s not lacking content that was the case 2-3 months ago but not now. Threads wants in on the Fediverse not for content, not the small number of users. It’s to avoid government bodies and antitrust. They like that moderation is split amongst communities.
Threads user numbers are misleading because of how easy it is to make an account and be counted as a user due to all of the instagram tie-in.
You keep saying that people must not “trust” threads users if they think Facebook could EEE and I don’t really get what that means. I don’t honestly want mastadon to only be for true believers. It’s more interesting if a wider range of people are on there.
I didn’t say not trust Threads users. I’m saying they do not trust Fediverse users. What I mean is that in order for Threads to EEE it would take adoption and compliance. It would take the masses here being too entangled with Threads that even if they do things people don’t like, those instances & users will simply start using Threads or bend completely to their will. Otherwise, people will block Threads and operate as usual. That’s what I believe will happen but many don’t.
Sorry, that was a big typo in my comment. That’s what I meant. I don’t want mastadon to only have true believers. I want more of everyone and Facebook will use EEE strategies to bootstrap threads off of mastadon and then harvest everyone but the true believers away.
I don’t see that happening. As long as those that taint Mastodon’s reputation are kept away things will be fine. “True believers” do not want more of everyone and that is part of the problem. People have various social needs that many on Mastodon don’t care about nor respect. If Threads wins them over by being more welcoming and accepting that says a lot. But, I must be fair. I have seen improvement within the culture and people actively working to be more open to others . I care more about users having their needs met than any one specific platform.
Someone did a breakdown here, I still think it’s a great idea to defed from them immediately.
https://wedistribute.org/2023/08/threads-new-terms-affects-the-fediverse/
Reading the article, they collect the data necessary to federate with an instance. If you or I were to run our own instance we would have access to the same data.
If they were to do anything with that data that they don’t have permission to do, like selling it. They would be in breach of the GDPR and fined 4% of their global annual income, and as we’ve seen with Apple, it’s not profitable to have two wildly separate versions of your product.
But again, Meta is first and foremost an advertising and data harvesting company, and many people aren’t happy at the idea of being subjected to this treatment from the vantage point of their own servers.
Fuck off. Defederate these guys.
And just remember that a substantial amount of Lemmy users want this, because they are too blind, childish and immature to see the very real negative consequences such a move will have.
But they only care because they’re either bots or hopelessly stupid simps.
they left reddit and support facebook ._.
Lmao.
They will be able to dictate how mastodon works of they become larger than the rest of the instances. Their stake in the network will make them more powerful than all the other instances combined.
They will be able to dictate how mastodon works
How they will do that ? How are they going to dictate the programmers of Mastodon/Lemmy ?
There’s a concept called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (seemingly coined, in that form, in a Microsoft antitrust lawsuit). Here’s the Wikipedia page on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
As I understand, people argue that Facebook/Meta, via Threads, will use this strategy in the long-term to either kill, or make effecitvely obsolete, the open technology behind Mastodon. If not that, then they could easily make the federation part of Threads buggy & unreliable, souring their users’ opinions on the “fediverse”.
They don’t need to control anyone; they only need to host a majority of the userbase (by being the most popular federated site). And they’re not starting from a user count of 1 or 10, unlike a lot of Mastodon sites.
Obviously, Mastodon & Lemmy, and the sites that run them, can keep chugging along just fine, but it’s argued that if Meta makes their federation implementation sub-par (or otherwise sabotages it), it’ll hurt the user-base growth of sites that use these projects (as people will see begin to see it as unreliable or what-not).
Is it as doom and gloom as people make it seem? Idk, I haven’t had time to care.
I dislike how the comment section is full of people hating on Mastodon people
Mastodon wearing the face of activitypub and fediverse really leads everyone to think it’s only mastodon. Replace mastodon with activitypub, because there’s lots of projects that are actually innovating instead of Mastodons (x)shitter cloning.
So seeing as the name is still threads does that mean he won the lawsuit someone filed against them to change the name as someone else already had that name for their product/company?
Like rules only exist if you’re not a billionaire I guess…
