Adam Mosseri:
Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.
And I have moved my mastodon account to an instance who actively defederated Threads. I’m not interested in interacting with anyone on that network.
And I’m fucking sick of the “content relevant for me” thing. I interact with people asking/giving help, discussing and so on. Mindlessly consuming “content” is simply a disease.
How many reasons does Meta have to give before distrust is the default?
“Hey, admin, why can’t I follow my mom on threads from your instance?”
“Because Meta facilitated genocide in Myanmar.”
While Facebook’s recommendation algorithm definitely plays a part here, most of this analysis could have "Facebook " replaced by “the internet” without changing any of the meaning. The same hate speech is also spread across WhatsApp (which caused WhatsApp to put a limit on the amount of times you can forward a message) and every other messenger.
Facebook’s automatic hate speech removal system may be pitifully ineffective, at least they have one. Here on the Fediverse, we have a slur filter, just sometimes, and even fewer moderators per user than Facebook has.
And, despite Facebook’s role in helping spread hate speech as a large platform and refusing to proactively go after such speech, here’s how the rest of your conversation will go:
“Hey, admin, why can’t I follow my mom on threads from your instance?”
“Because Meta facilitated genocide in Myanmar.”
“Aw, that’s bad. Anyway, I’ll just create a Threads account I guess, my mom is sharing my niece’s baby pictures.”
Same reason why Telegram friends won’t go to Signal: they don’t care about the platform they use, and you end up being that friend if you ask them to change their habits for you.
Once Threads support federation in both direction, the need to move disappears completely. Why would you move to a server run by volunteers that sometimes goes down when Elon says something stupid, especially if your Mastodon friends can interact with your account like normal. That’s ActivityPub working and doing what it’s supposed to do.
And I have moved my mastodon account to an instance who actively defederated Threads.
Is that pretty easy to do?
fairly easy. you can export the list of your followers and followed account, block lists, bookmarks and so on, and import them in the new account. the posts you’ve made aren’t moved, though. https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-another-server/
Anyone who doesn’t understand that connecting in any way to Facebook is not a good thing … is either very naive, or complicit to wanting to take down the fediverse.
Facebook already has enough content and enough of a platform on their own – they literally control half of the worldwide social media network. Why do they want to spread into this new space?
The only reason they want to be on this side is to conquer or destroy.
This perspective of “Either you agree with me or you’re complicit in a conspiracy against me” is incredibly childish and immature.
Sometimes people have different opinions than you. Try to find a way to deal with it.
To me it’s like warning someone to not stand in the middle of the highway, and having some guy go “don’t tell me what to do, I have the right to disagree with you”.
There are idiots in the world and their opinions are actually idiotic. :)
It’s 100% super obvious that Meta wants to control the fediverse, and that’s why they are coming for it.
Can you explain how it’s 100% super obvious? I thought a popular platform with many users entering the fediverse might be good for exposure but it seems like the consensus here is that it’s actually bad. Help me understand how it’s bad?
Normally and with very many other issues … I would agree with you … but on this issue I’m very adamant about what I see and believe.
Think about it … Facebook is a billion dollar corporation and they show interest in your little world and the little things you are doing and they want to join you. This is a company that already has billions invested in systems that already have billions of users and millions of dollars of man power and technological resources. Why do they want to step into what we are doing here? Why do they feel a need to step into our space? Do they need more users? Do they need help from us?
Big corporations are only interested in perpetual growth at all costs. They are also deathly afraid of competition or the potential of future competition. Look at the history of manufacturing, automotive corporations over the past hundred years … it’s a long history of the strong eating the weak.
I agree my argument may sound childish or extreme but in this instance it’s pretty clear … if you let them in, it’s basically the beginning of the end for the fediverse.
It’s the metaphorical Trojan Horse … once it’s inside and firmly established, everything will be lost.
Why do they want to step into what we are doing here?
I think there’s a much simpler explanation. Elon’s actions are causing users to want to leave the platform. Meta wants to pounce on this opportunity. ActivityPub is an established, open source protocol that allows Meta to quickly spin up a Twitter competitor. The federated nature means that Meta can reduce regulatory risk. At the same time, they can lobby for increased scrutiny of Twitter since it isn’t interroperable like Threads.
I have no idea if this is actually how Meta is strategizing. But what I definitely know is that Meta absolutely doesn’t consider federated social media a threat. They aren’t trying to squash us. They’re aimed at Twitter. If they make some change that degrades the experience for us, absolutely we should consider defederation. Until then, let’s try to make some converts out of Threads users.
I see you conveniently left out the bit where they said people could also just be naive. Kind of funny how you attempted to take the moral high ground and lecture this person like they were a small child, yet you yourself cherrypicked in bad faith just to have some little takedown moment. One of you certainly came off more childish and immature in this exchange and it wasn’t the other guy.
Tell that to @Gargron@mastodon.social (the creator of Mastdon, AFAIK). He’s very excited about this. And I can’t honestly understand why.
https://mstdn.social/@Gargron@mastodon.social/111576826633308486
Well he’s not alone … a number of relatively vocal “fedi-advocates” are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.
Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where “we” are up to.
From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves “the good guys” and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating “significant” technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They’re all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.
When face-to-face with the prospect of having “your thing” accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. “Growing the protocol” and “growing” mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.
This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they’re “the good guys” and don’t work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their “ethical-tech” world … the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.
Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer “growth” might completely miss the point especially if it’s by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.
And this is where I’m up to on this issue … both sides seem not to be talking about it much.
What is the “emotional”, “social fabric”, “vibes and feelings” factor in all this … that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens … when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL’s loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I’m betting most will feel off … like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit … passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves … “what was the point of coming here in the first place?”.
Now, to be real, it’s not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it’s an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won’t be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? … that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it’d rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)
Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they’re willing to drink for their ends.
For my purposes … I don’t think I’ll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens … the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it … I’d rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.
The communities you like, are shielded by those OSS terms: if Meta does something to the tech that the communities don’t like, they’re free to show Meta the finger. The tech is not, and can never be, controlled by Meta; the communities are not, and can never be, bound by Meta.
Meanwhile, having a company like Meta collaborate on developing and testing the tech, is something positive.
Yea I was really confused to read that. I’m on Kbin / Lemmy significantly more than I log in to Mastadon (I think I’ve opened that app 5 times in the past year), so now I guess I’ll just delete Mastadon.
I bet he’s getting a big bag of money.
Are you truly incapable of imagining that someone might have a different opinion than you without being bribed?
“Everyone who disagrees with me must be getting paid” is not the mature take you think it is.
Just migrate your account to a different instance, if you plan to use it. It’s not difficult and many of them already defederate from Threads (mstdn.social, for instance).
The fediverse means all of them. Mastodon users post to Lemmy and Kbin. We’ll see threads here.
Let’s apply Occam’s Razor. We all created these juggernaut social media vampires in the 2000s as an alternative to isolated forums and the first federation attempts with Webrings. When it started, Facebook was a good thing.
He could simply be repeating the same mistake the entire internet did by embracing monolithic social media sites in the first place.
Your Mastodon data is already an open book to Meta if they care to have it. The protocol is open, they could already be black-ops scooping up everything that’s fit to federate without turning on Threads federation, so them doing that really changes nothing. And what I mean by that is that they could already have set up unknown instances to leech whatever data they want out of the Fediverse, which instances masquerade as normal mom and pop installs just federating and sucking up everything without bringing anything back to the table. There’s literally nothing stopping them from leeching everything out of the Fediverse at any time other than people being better at detecting their activity (and actively thwarting that activity) than Meta is at keeping it off the radar.
In this case they’re making it so that I might have a chance to follow and interact with people already in the Meta/Instagram/Threads atmosphere without having to convince those people to leave the confines of what they’re comfortable with and find a Mastodon instance to sign up for. Maybe they’ll be more comfortable with leaving Meta after dipping their toes in the open spec?
How is that not a win? If Meta/Threads decide that they want to fracture the protocol and go do their own thing later, so what? We’ll go right back to where we were before they brought their users into the Fediverse. If people decide that they value the Threads extras/connections more than they value the purity of the ActivityPub protocol then maybe Meta is actually providing something that matters and we’ve lost by not supplying that need before the corporate interest figured out that it existed. In that case we’ll deserve the death that causes in use of the open spec, but the open spec will still be there and people who want to do their own thing with it can’t be stopped now. The code to run an open ActivityPub Mastodon instance is already out there and it’s impossible to take it back now.
Everyone is out here decrying this as a subtle takeover of the Fediverse by Meta, but did Facebook “takeover” the HTTP spec when they started operating facebook (dot) com on the world wide web over the HTTP protocol? It’s an insane assertion. I’ve been running my own opensource web servers since well before Facebook was a thing and I’ve continued to do so despite most people opting to depend on a mega-corp to be steward of their online presence. That Meta has a very successful and popular website that I’ve never been a fan of has never impacted my ability to use the open protocol they operate on to continue doing my own thing. The same thing will be true here.
It really seems like people are just upset that Threads might bring ActivityPub to the mainstream and force them to contend with the realization that a diaspora of open spec implementations already lost the war to Meta/Facebook. We had that once before. It was called the World Wide Web and you could go and find forums, fan pages, company websites, and everything else back then that has since moved to Facebook (or other content aggregator sites) because people value the network effects and homogenization more than they care about one big company being in charge of it all. (…and not to belabor the point, but most of that stuff is still out there, it’s just waned in popularity because the network effects are not there.) Here we are with a chance to try and break things out again and people are seemingly worried that we can’t if we let the Meta users in? Maybe they’re right, maybe it’s impossible to achieve victory here, but gatekeeping the standard and enacting some purity test for which providers are allowed on the protocol isn’t going to tip the scales in favor of the open standards implementation.
If the protocol is truly open, then how can a corporation embracing it be a danger? We’re all free to adopt any changes or not at any point in the journey so it’s impossible to lose, you’re free to keep doing your own thing any way you look at it. Tell me how any of this is untrue.
TL;DR: Threads coming to the Fediverse is a good thing. It’ll make it possible to expand the network effects of an open protocol far faster and more than any amount of Fedinerds proselyting the gospel of ActivityPub ever will. The only thing that is at risk of being lost is that we’ll refuse to adapt to what end users want fast enough to keep a large corporation from bending the spec to their ends. Which loss again only means that you’d be cutting yourself off from those who WANT to embrace the revised spec by not adopting those changes yourself. That option (to just not adopt changes to the spec) can’t be taken away from you in the future, so worrying is only warranted if you feel like your ideal ActivityPub implementation can’t win out in the marketplace of ideas and that you’re owed that victory even if others are able to expand it in ways that people actually want to use enough to dismiss whatever downsides it contains.
This was the first comment on this post that made me feel like I wasn’t taking crazy pills. I agree completely. I still don’t see how Threads joining ActivityPub is a bad thing for us, unless it convinces a large number of people to migrate to Threads from their current instance.
Fuck threads
Mark Zuckerturds destroys everything he touches, and now he wants to touch you.
If this is the level of maturity that’s going to represent the Fediverse, I’m almost inclined to believe they actually do have pure intentions, because there’s no way this shit is financially valuable.
There’s a large number of people here that have a deeply emotional hatred for anything related to Meta and I get that. But these dull comments don’t make for a fun discussion. They don’t add anything. They won’t affect anything. They’re just boring comments wasting everyone’s time.
The difference is twitter is just another big social media platform. Elon Musk isn’t potentially trying to ruin an open source federated alternative that fixes a lot of the problems with social media. He’s just messing around with and tanking a big corpo social media site.
So I honesty don’t really care about twitter as it will get us more users if he burns it down, if the Zuck doesn’t ruin us first.
Basically twitter isn’t a threat to us and could actually be a big help.
Threads could ruin everything we’ve worked for.
I can follow him on kbin.
https://kbin.social/u/@mosseri@threads.net/posts
Interoperability was the purpose of activitypub. I’m not oppossed to Meta , Tumblr and wordpress joining the fediverse.
As long as I can use an open source community platform.
Let’s hope this isn’t the first step of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Although in reality it probably is.
It will end up being de facto EEE, the same way it’s become functionally impossible to run your own email server. Sure you technically can, but the handful of big players block everything else and make it impossible to actually email anyone.
It’ll be like that on the fediverse. Big companies like this will dominate the space, refuse to federate with most others except the big players, and people will realize that unless you only want a mastodon instance with like 20 people on it, it won’t be worth the trouble.
That’s not even true, I run my own mailserver for private and a business and it works like expected.
So what do you suggest, out of curiosity? I have the same assessment, it just seems like the only way it could work, long-term and for all users.
100% agree, I think most reactions here are blown way out of proportion even though I can relate to the general “fuck meta” attitude.
Lol, as if Facebook cares about the Fediverse. With its 141 million users, Threads is already ten times bigger than the Fediverse ever was.
ActivityPub isn’t a threat to their business, Bluesky is.
They do. Their business model is to take out upstarts with growing popularity trends. By the time they actually get big, it’s too late.
With several organisations making the move to the fediverse, it is something they want to deal with.
EEE doesn’t work with FOSS, where anyone can fork a project and go with it.
Ask Oracle how well EEE worked for them with Sun, Java, or MySQL. Ask Microsoft how well adding the WSL worked to kill Linux.
Threads can try as much as they want, the fediverse is already full of different projects like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Calckey, etc. and they aren’t extinguishing each other.
EEE doesn’t work with FOSS, where anyone can fork a project and go with it.
The point of EEE isn’t outright destruction but marketplace irrelevance. FOSS projects can absolutely be hit by it.
Java actually was hit by EEE tactics from Microsoft, and they were actually rather successful. Sun has to sue MS to stop them from calling their Java VMs Java.
HTML was hit by EEE tactics so well that for years IE was the only game in town and other browsers couldn’t compete.
