I don’t understand what Meta will gain from participating in the fediverse? Their ultimate goal is to make money of Threads and I just don’t see how encouraging an open federation will help them do it? Even 3Eing the fediverse will not do them much good as they already have sooo much traffic already that killing the fediverse will not make a serious change in their figures. But OTOH it does seem like Threads is net positive for the fediverse ATM. Even if all current denizens of the fediverse will block Threads, there is a large group of people that are exposed to the concept of “fediverse” for the fist time and some of them will want to learn more. This is a good thing. Anyway, I don’t know why they are doing it, but I’m cautiously glad they did it. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
I think they’re trying to get people off Fedi and into Threads.
Yeah that’s a possibility. They could do something like “ohh too bad Killer Feature X is looking so badly on Mastodon. On Threads it will look so much better”. Essentially using fedi as a crappy demo for Threads. That sounds like a typical business plan to me.
I think people around here have a vastly overestimated opinion of how important the fediverse is to other social media sites.
Within the first 7 hours of Threads, they had 10 million users.
Meta absolutely DGAF about us. They don’t have to. Using ActivityPub is at worst an anti-monopoly play. But by the time they turn on federation, all of the people who were going to leave the fediverse for Threads will likely already have done so.
This is what people aren’t getting. The fediverse, as it is now, is irrelevant to Meta’s plans for Threads. Meta views the fediverse as an inducement to get creators to join Threads. Per The Verge:
As Mosseri puts it, this is a move designed to appease creators who have grown increasingly wary of relying on the whims of centralized social media companies. “I think we might be a more compelling platform for creators, particularly for the newer creators who are more and more savvy, if we are a place where you don’t have to feel like you have to trust us forever,” he says.
@jcrabapple @ComptitiveSubset EEE. Embrace, extend and extinguish.
“Mastodon is so hard to understand, at least Threads is easy.”
Once people start saying that Meta will be in charge of the fediverse.
I don’t know, aren’t most of the citizens of the fediverse here because we are abandoning the large, profit-driven social media companies? It seems like it’s more of an invasion than persuasion - they want access to what we have, and since the AP is open, they can get access to it (mostly Mastodon, but also the content we have on the wider fediverse as well).
I would bet 100 dollars they want in on the Fediverse because they want to extinguish a competitor. They did it with Instagram and Whatsapp. They’ll do it again.
My opinion is it’s just the data, Meta is all about collecting data. Being part of the fediverse means they potentially get access to a bunch of data through scraping and user interactions.
For example someone might not follow a gardening account on instagram/Facebook but they might join a gardening community. That’s valuable data.
They can also boast about the new technology. Maybe they hope it will revive the meta verse lol
They can already access the data, it’s all federated and it’s all publically available effectively by definition, they don’t need to launch a platform that interacts with Fedi in order to scrape it. And Meta will only be able to scrape user profiling data on the people accessing Fediverse through their own tools and platforms. In the large term, all data is useful and getting the additional facets of how their users interact with a twitter-like platform is good - but I don’t think that’s really why they chose to federate.
But…
What joining Fediverse does offer them is a way of launching their Twitter-rival product with genuine and organic content or activity already present.
Facebook & Instagram’s primary demographics are not internet pioneers, they don’t tend to build new things - they feed off existing activity and build on top of it. They access the platforms to consume content, and only move to creating or posting content over time as they develop networks on the sites. Meta cannot realistically launch a Twitter competitor whole-cloth. The sort of people who joined Twitter early to build that space aren’t joining a Meta product, likewise the people who join new platforms or normal fediverse.
If it launched empty, it would remain empty. People would check it out, see almost no content or no content they care about, and not come back. Meta can only realistically launch a product like Threads with activity already occurring, and things like AI content or fake profiles aren’t necessarily convincing enough to lure in the punters. But Fedi is preexisting and active and there’s already A Thing there that Meta can point their users at, there’s already content to consume and people to interact with.
My opinion is it’s just the data, Meta is all about collecting data. Being part of the fediverse means they potentially get access to a bunch of data through scraping and user interactions.
You’re absolutely right! Just take a look at the privacy of the Threads app. Even if you don’t have Threads app installed, they can figure out anyone from another fediverse server. That’s the reason fediverse servers should not federate with Meta servers.
They can scrape that data withiut federating. Anyone can, there’s a public API. And I suspect once they federate Threads, Mastodon will be a tiny share of the resulting fediverse.
No to say they won’t ingest all that data, of course, they’ll get their hands on everything they can, but I doubt it’s the primary motivation behind it.
That’s a very good point. There’s always an agenda when it comes to these massive companies. The more data they have, the more predictions they can make, and the more accurate they’ll be. Understanding how people move through these communities is massive for Meta. The more you understand something, the better you know how to exploit it.
Their main goal is to kill twitter. Their second goal is to skirt antimonopoly laws when they succeed to kill twitter. Their third and optional goal is to starve twitter-like fediverse apps from users. They has loads of resource, if they can come with good and familiar ui without usual growing pains that fediverse has (server overloaded, client not ready), many non tech savy users will never look beyond threads. Thus robbing mastodon, calckey, pleroma, etc from potential users and attention.
While I agree overall, I definitely agree with that last sentence. As someone who originally joined the Fediverse for the first in March via Mastodon, I’ve since then spread out and tried the many other fedi products (is that even the right word to use?) and have since settled on a Misskey forked server called Foundkey for my “Twitter” experience. While I agree with others that Threads being part of the Fediverse is good, I also agree in that the familiarity with Meta/Facebook will make people not want to branch out and explore what else the Fediverse has to offer which in turn hurts everyone else.
Their third and optional goal is to starve twitter-like fediverse apps from users. […] Thus robbing mastodon, calckey, pleroma, etc from potential users and attention.
They can (will) do that without federating. Federating (or not) is not going to make any appreciable difference.
This is why I place it as third and optional goal. Few percent of people who knows fediverse doesn’t participate in it because not many instance is as reliable as big companies service. They may be willing to migrate to mastodon when the software is more matured, but now migrating to threads instead because of meta’s backing.
Don’t you think people will switch from threads to Mastodon? I think there are allot of people who would rather not have Meta’s app installed on their phone.
In western cultural hemisphere, yes. Antimeta and anti big-corporation backed social media has gained big momentum.
Meanwhile on global south, they didn’t even know what privacy is. And fediverse user on my country is less than 1000 from tens of millions people. In global-south at least, I saw potential to introduce fediverse to greater masses using thread.
I’ll summarize what the CEO of Instagram said in an interview on the Hardfork podcast this morning. Lots of hot takes here based on everyone’s rightful skepticism of Meta, but I think it’s worth understanding what their stated plan is.
First, the CEO said he thinks federation is the future, that social media in general is going to be increasingly moving that way in the next 5 years. This gives them a chance to take a big early swing in the space and get some learning in. Remeber, as much as a lot of fediverse people are worried about Threads joining, Threads is also worried about all of you who are already on the Fediverse. Part of what they are selling is a sane and we’ll moderated social platform that regular people can use, and federating is a challenge to their moderation. They are trying to work out how they can moderate content coming into the Threads server and shown to those users without having to defederate entire servers.
Second, and similar to number one, they expect that content creators, influencers, etc will come to expect account/follower portability as decentralization of social media becomes more widespread. This one is huge, and it’s one of their main selling points. They are telling celebrities that hey you can join Threads and it will be safe and sane, but if five years down the line you hate it, you can just pack up your account and move to another platform and keep all your followers. This is a really big deal, celebrities, influencers, journalists, etc spend years building followings and the main thing holding a lot back from jumping off Twitter for example is that when they go to a new platform they start with zero followers. Joining a platform where you are assured that you can jump ship without having to start at zero everytime is a huuuge selling point, and the reason they’ve been able to get celebrities on as early adopters.
Finally, the CEO said ads will probably come some day, but they are not focused on monetization at all right now, but just building a sustainable platform that is fun to use. They expect a lot of initial interest, and then for a bunch of users to get bored and leave, and then to work on slow growth overtime.
That’s straight from the horse’s mouth (via my memory). Was he being perfectly honest, probably not. For example, he said they made the decision to push Threads out now before it was fully EU complaint because EU compliance would take months and he was afraid they could miss their window of opportunity. He wouldn’t explicitly say Twitter has gone to shit and their going after that market, but that’s pretty clearly what he was alluding to. Also, keep in mind as a corporate representative all his statements can get the company in trouble for misleading shareholders (see Musks “going private at 420 a share” tweet for example), so he’s not able to outright lie about the company’s plans. So I’d take this all with a grain of salt, but I wouldn’t run immediately to conspiracy theories.
ads will probably come some day, but they are not focused on monetization at all right now
most sites do not start out shittified, they become ENshittified.
That is fair. I mostly just think its interesting that he was fairly upfront about it. Meta is a for profit business, so its not unexpected. I do think it will be interesting though because they seem pretty committed to account portability, and if they stick with that then that puts some pressure on them to maintain a good user experience. Even all the talk about embrace, extend, extinguish, all starts with the assumption that Threads will be so big it will make changes and force other instances to either comply or get defederated and the assumption is that users would flock to Threads from Mastadon rather than the other way around. Personally, I expect Meta’s move here is going to increase interest in Activitypub and more projects are going to be launched on it, both from startups and established big tech. I think its equally plausible that the better analogy is AOL opening up to the world wide web and HTML and getting swallowed in the process. There is a lot of fear about Threads, but I’m not convinced this is a doomsday scenario for the fediverse, I’m personally cautiously optimistic.
It’s nice to see a (cautiously) optimistic voice on this subject for a change, although I think I feel less optimistic than you. But I do think there’s the potential for it to be mutually beneficial so long as Meta remains non-malevolent.
I think there a few key differences that mean the Google XMPP situation can be used as a direct parallel, too. Google didn’t really see much benefit from staying federated, because all federation did with live messaging was mean that non-Google users were benefitting from Google’s users without being monetised by Google. When Google’s users lost access to their non-Google contacts, the vast majority of them just carried on as usual, meaning Google continued monetising them as usual and it was only beneficial for Google as a company.
I don’t think that’s the case with Threads. Meta will continue to benefit from federating with well-moderated content in the future because, for Meta, it’s content that’s being created for free by another platform that they can still monetise. And if it’s well-moderated content, that’s effectively free moderation, too - something Meta would normally have to employ people for.
More interest in Activity Pub from other big players would definitely be a good thing, if only to make sure no one company has a monopoly. It would potentially have disadvantages, of course, but I think if tech giants are going to get involved, I’d rather multiple get involved to keep things somewhat competitive and (hopefully) drive consumer-friendly ideas.
It’s interesting that they’re worried about moderation. It wouldn’t seem like too hard of a thing for a $100 billion company to just hire some some folks to take care of that.
I think its more how do they deal with moderation while federating. When you have a closed system, you can control everything. But when you have users on Threads reading posts from Mastadon.Social or some random smaller instances, how do you effectively filter the stuff coming into your server that your users will interact with. I don’t know enough how that all works, but the CEO seemed to characterize it as a technical problem they were working to solve.
By being the first major social network to adopt activityhub, it means they have an advantage when/if activityhub takes off.
Little nitpick, just to help people find it if they’re curious — it’s called ActivityPub.
