I’m surprised it’s taking them so long. It seems like it shouldn’t be that much of a technical challenge for an organization with Meta’s resources, especially when it was planned before the service even launched.
They might be talking about data harvesting and revenue generation driven from federated sources.
If you mean from the Fediverse side, it’s not really possible. At least not from Mastodon.
People have this misunderstanding, if they add ads, it will be for users of #threads, other servers will not see the ad. What about if they inject an ad to every post? That would make no sense, their income come from ads, but personalized ads, you probably hate them, but tons of people find them useful, besides they won’t be able to have metrics for a wall of text or image at the bottom of every post for others in the #fediverse.
If your instance chooses to federate with them, how wouldn’t it be possible for them to process that data?
Could be just tactics. Remember the uproar the first time it was said threads would federate? Suddenly they were “not ready yet”.
Now in the second go, the idea got already normalized and there are more pro-meta comments. And they will stay silent and non-intrusive at the beginning.
Zuck is really big into early adaptation (metaverse i.e.), they see potential in the fediverse and their first objective is to be part of it, then grow with it and finally take advantage of it, once the time is right.
It’s really not a good thing that some people think the fediverse is going to go up in flames as soon as meta joins. That’s obviously not going to happen and sets wrong expectations that could lead to more acceptance.
I’ve not seen any pro meta posts. Unless this is meant in the same vein as those calling out Israel are portrayed as pro hamas wrongly. What I have seen is a lot of baseless speculation, and uninformed opinion being thrown around as fact.
We should definitely keep an eye on every capitalist or authoritarian. Because they’d gladly sacrifice our lives and privacy for a few dollars more. But anyone who thinks integrating their own servers is going to give them any more information than the servers already give anyone who asks. Has a flawed understanding of what is possible and likely.
This is all akin to the people who never used XMPP claiming Google killed it. Which is another bit of fear uncertainty and doubt being thrown out to stir people up in these threads as well. I have used XMPP consistently for the last 20+ years. I’m logged in this very minute. They just had a 2023 Google summer of code conclude.
We should watch meta like a hawk. And of course not give them special treatment. But they want to connect to us. We have the keys and the power if they don’t want to play by the rules. We don’t have to federate with them. They’re going to collect the data regardless. But the enemy of our enemy can still be useful.
I do imagine they have a dirty trick in mind and I’m not sure what it is yet. Perhaps they aren’t either.
There’s also an opportunity though. Threads users will get exposed to open source, independently-hosted alternatives they wouldn’t have heard about otherwise. Some of them will switch. If those projects can offer a better user experience than Threads, more of them will switch.
I suspect the angle is something around avoiding regulation, they were happy with the previous “we’re just a platform” arrangement where they could hold their hands up and waive responsibility for the content and users on it. Now that’s actively being remediated by various governments, I think they’re hoping they can make claims of reduced responsibility for what’s on their site if it can come from elsewhere in the fediverse.
I’m not sure about specifics, but my gut feeling is that this is the angle
Take your time. Take forever.
If we want wider adoption and tout interoperability than we need to allow some other platforms to integrate in some ways. I do agree though it makes me a bit anxious, but I also think it would be silly for email clients to bar gmail accounts from interacting with them.
That’s all nice an idealistic and shit, buut…
Why the hell would they bother trying? Meta has literal billions of users. They can, and if we let them, will swallow tge fediverse whole, and barely notice.
The whole fediverse has less than 1% of their users.
They aren’t here altruistically.
They’re here like columbus.
That’s all nice an idealistic and shit, buut…
It’s a core selling point of activitypub/the fediverse. It’s the reason why we’re on Kbin and able to interact with people across countless other instances. It’s also how email - the #1 thing all of this is compared to - functions. If we aren’t going to seek sone level of interoperability with the “larger Internet“ then why are we doing all of this? There are far easier ways to run forums and interact with people. This is incredibly convoluted when you get down to it and it’s because we are trying to foster a decentralized, relatively diverse ecosystem.
Please do not patronize/dismiss me like that. Presumably we are both adults and can handle respectful disagreement.
Take your time, Mark III Zucker-borg. I’m in no rush for you to screw up yet another web site with your ads and your propaganda.
My takeaways:
Mosseri says that the Threads team wants to make it so the option to follow a Threads account on other platforms is available to “all public accounts on Threads, not just a handful of testers.”
You can only follow other threads accounts?
At the moment, he says the team plans to require accounts to be public and that users “explicitly opt in” to showing their posts on other federated servers. But the team is still considering making this the default, with the choice to opt out, instead.
They’re planning on using the fediverse content and server space without providing any.
The Threads team wants to let replies from other platforms show up inside of Threads. “It’s a bad experience now that I have to leave the Threads app to see replies I’m getting from the broader community,”
It’s the content they want the most, this makes it clear if you have to leave their app to reply to someone on another instance. We’re the zoo.
This is a key one: follower portability. “Eventually, it should also be possible to enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app / server,” Mosseri writes. “I believe that it’s important that creators own their relationship with their audience.”
The bolded words makes me think that they’re not going to do any of that, lol
Please instance owners, don’t wait and see.
This is a key one: follower portability. “Eventually, it should also be possible to enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app / server,” Mosseri writes. “I believe that it’s important that creators own their relationship with their audience.”
How do they benefit from it though? 🤔
They benefit by being able to say to regulators, especially in the EU, that they aren’t a monopoly that locks people into their ecosystem. They avoid expensive legal battles, fines, and possibly being forced to open their other, more lucrative silos. These are lesser benefits, but they also get cred for doing something cool, get to position themselves as a better alternative to Twitter, and might get to say that they beat Bluesky to full federation.
That’s reasonable although I believe it’s just not how they do things. This feature lets their users to move to ad-free mastodon instances including those that signed fedi-pact. And it will be available in a few clicks in their app (I suppose it will).
they beat Bluesky to full federation.
I also think they’re more interested in Bluesky.
Their last EU fine was $1.3 billion. That’s change-how-you-do-things money. The EU is getting more serious about tech regulation. It also made Apple add RCS support, which they swore they’d never do.
This feature lets their users to move to ad-free mastodon instances including those that signed fedi-pact.
I don’t think that’s possible. You have to be federated. Suspended servers can’t connect at all so there’s no way to transfer followers or set a redirect. It’s not something you can just choose to not respect - suspension is something done to untrustworthy servers so requiring them to honor it would completely break it immediately. If they signed the fedi pact and didn’t act, that’s not really on Meta.
idk, the primary motivator is probably PR, but there is a chance that there’s still a trace, a glimmer of empathy and excitement for innovation, hidden way down somewhere in that human.
Don’t count on it, though.
Great, so he is already talking about how to extend activityPub? He says that like this function will be a one way street. This is literally what many here are talking about.
If I understand correctly he’s talking about the ability to export your account data and then import it to another compatible fedi server. Other software (mastodon, latest version of lemmy, etc) also do it on a client side, so I don’t think any changes to AP will be necessary.
What is concerning is his wording about “to leave threads”. Consider that whatever saying in this interview is carefully laid out beforehand. What reason is there for a corporation that is living of it’s users to just so casually let them leave like they please with everything that is giving value to Meta? He is not talking about wanting the users to leave threads, but to be able to migrate either direction. Who is going to win that fight in the end? The corporation who’s solely goal is to win or the free and open community that is so tolerant that it invites the beast it fled from?
May be the whole plan is to kill ActivityPub or they want all the data to train AI or target ads.
