• Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldOP
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      11 months ago

      My primary concern is that they appear to be allowing Thread content to be pulled into other Fedi clients, but not the inverse. So Threads content on Mastodon, but no Mastodon content on Threads. That’s not super great for Mastodon exposure.

      Also, given the vast differences in daily active users, wouldn’t Mastodon become flooded, and eventually dependent, on Threads content?

      • blazeknave@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Jfc sounds like they’re just paving over the community with a giant ad of themselves

      • breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        Also, given the vast differences in daily active users, wouldn’t Mastodon become flooded, and eventually dependent, on Threads content?

        Servers only pull subscribed user content, so it’s not like the option is nothing or The Firehose. Meta can’t push content into the Fediverse.

        I think it’s important to note that Meta doesn’t have more power than anyone else here. They’re just a large instance. They have the same forces keeping them honest as anyone else and their size doesn’t change the incentives for mods and admins. Mods don’t have an interest in working for Meta for free. If they’re spending too much of their time moderating that content, Threads will be limited or defederated.

        Given Meta’s size and history it’s understandable to be concerned. At the end of the day though, they’ll either play nice or get bounced. I think we’ll be fine either way.

        • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldOP
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          11 months ago

          What about clients that have discovery feeds for content you might not be subbed to? Would that be a problem?

          • breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca
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            11 months ago

            That’s a good question. I don’t know. My guess is that you could be exposed to Threads content you don’t want in the same way you could be exposed to Mastodon content you don’t want. I can’t imagine they’re not set up to respect blocks, mutes, or server suspensions though, right? They have a way bigger problem than Threads if they don’t.

          • NicoCharrua@lemmy.ca
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            11 months ago

            What do you mean discovery feeds? Like the federated/all tab?

            Because those feeds only show posts that the instance knows about, which is (mostly) posts from people that at least one person on your instance followed.

            If you check the all tab on a small instance, it’s a lot quieter than it is on something like mastodon.social.

      • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I personally remain neutral on this. The issue you point out is definitely a problem, but Threads is just now testing this, so I think it’s too early to tell. Same with embrace, extend, extinguish concerns. People should be vigilant of the risks, and prepared, but we’re still mostly in wait and see land. On the other hand, threads could be a boon for the fidiverse and help to make it the main way social media works in five years time. We just don’t know yet.

        There are just always a lot of “the sky is falling” takes about Threads that I think are overblown and reactionary

        Just to be extra controversial, I’m actually coming around on Meta as a company a bit. They absolutely were evil, and I don’t fully trust them, but I think they’ve been trying to clean up their image and move in a better direction. I think Meta is genuinely interested in Activitypub and while their intentions are not pure, and are certainly profit driven, I don’t think they have a master plan to destroy the fidiverse. I think they see it in their long term interest for more people to be on the fidiverse so they can more easily compete with TikTok, X, and whatever comes next without the problems of platform lockin and account migration. Also meta is probably the biggest player in open source llm development, so they’ve earned some open source brownie points from me, particularly since I think AI is going to be a big thing and open source development is crucial so we don’t end up ina world where two or three companies control the AGI that everyone else depends on. So my opinion of Meta is evolving past the Cambridge Analytica taste that’s been in my mouth for years.

        • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
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          11 months ago

          You had us in the first half, but anyone who thinks theres any part of meta thats trustworthy is either paid off or an idiot. Sorry bud, but thats fresh horseshit flavor thats rinsing the CA taste from your mouth.

          Facebook isnt even actually dead yet, youre 4-6 decades too early to even entertain the thought that meta is safe to conditionally trust.

          • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            That’s totally fair and I knew that would be controversial. I’m very heavily focused on AI professionally and I give very few shits about social media, so maybe my perspective is a little different. The fact that there is an active open source AI community owes a ton to Meta training and releasing their Llama LLM models as open source. Training LLMs is very hard and very expensive, so Meta is functionally subsidizing the open source AI community, and their role I think is pretty clearly very positive in that they are preventing AI from being entirely controlled by Google and OpenAI/Microsoft. Given the stakes of AI, the positive role Meta has played with open source developers, it’s really hard to be like “yeah but remember CA 7 years ago and what about how Facebook rotted my uncle’s brain!”

            All of that said, I’m still not buying a quest, or signing up for any Meta social products, I don’t like or trust them. I just don’t have the rage hardon a lot of people do.

            • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
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              11 months ago

              Big difference between “large company tries to undermine its competitors” and “large company is working with people to advance new tech.”

              Meta is using open source to try and slow down its 2 biggest enemies in the field who have better funding and resources. That open source benefits the masses is incidental and likely regretful from metas perspective. They just dont have a better option to prevent themselves being left in the dust.

              • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                I’m not going to argue Meta doesn’t have a profit incentive here, but if they just wanted to slow down their rivals they could have closed source their model and released their own product using the model, or shared it with a dozen or so promising startups. They gain nothing by open sourcing, but did it anyway. Whatever their motivations, at the end of the day they opened sourced a model, so good for them.

                I really dislike being in the position of defending Meta, but the world is not all black and white, there are no good guys and bad guys. Meta is capable of doing good things, and maybe overtime they’ll build a positive reputation. I honestly think they are tired of being the shitty evil company that everyone hates, who is best known for a shitty product nobody but boomers uses, and have been searching for years now for a path forward. I think threads, including Activitypub, and Llama are evidence that their exploring a different direction. Will they live up to their commitments on both Activitypub and open source, I don’t know, and I think it’s totally fair to be skeptical, but I’m willing to keep an open mind and acknowledge when they do good things and move in the right direction.

                • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
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                  11 months ago

                  Im also sure they are sick of their reputation.

                  I just dont see how open sourcing a new type of tech that is riddled with ethical issues over intellectual property rights and content replacement in a way that doesnt actually really address those ethical questions has done anything to change their reputation.

                  Id love to see them move in a right direction. But I dont think chasing the heels of their competitors swinging a bolas in the hopes of catching a dropped lunch is the right direction.

                  (And if you dont wanna keep arguing it 100% fair, but they definitely benefit from open sourcing their work.)

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
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          11 months ago

          Ok, so hold the fuck up for a second - most of what you said makes sense, but then you anthropomorphised a massive company that has more influence on global politics than most governments, and could be fairly blamed for mental health issues globally

          Facebook is, and was, evil. They do not have morals, they have metrics. Their metrics have not changed.

          They invented doomscrolling, intentionally - this wasn’t something they stumbled upon, they did unethical psychological experiments on users.

          For example, they shadow banned users. They made it so no one could see their posts, just to see what feelings of isolation would do to engagement… Luckily it didn’t increase engagement. They created invisible echo chambers and artificial controversy, which did work, and is now common practice for social media

          Facebook has created some of the greatest open source software in existence. React and pytorch are two that I use frequently. They were first made while the company was actively experimenting with the power to manipulate democracy

          Facebook has some of the best engineers, and does a ton of great open source work. They also have some of the most amoral people in positions of authority.

          They’re not the same people - the teams who do AI research at Facebook? Great people doing great work

          The people who do social media at Facebook? Never trust them. They have a PR problem and are treading lightly.

          They want to mine the fediverse for information on users. I don’t think this is an EEE plan… But I think that every time this arm of the company finds themselves in a position of control, they ask “how can we leverage this?”

          • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            All great points, maybe my view of Meta as a single entity isn’t a good way to think about them. I wasn’t aware of their open source work outside of LLMs so that is interesting. Your right on with your assessment of what they’ve done in the social media space. I disagree on the point that they want to mine fidiverse user data, just because I don’t think they need to do all this work to integrate threads into activitypub to do that, there are easier ways. But I think your right to be skeptical of Metas intentions.

            On the other hand, big companies adopting Activitypub could be a great thing for the fediverse. So risks and benefits. I’ll keep my neutrality for now. But you make a good argument.

            • theneverfox@pawb.social
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              11 months ago

              Of course they’re doing it to mine user data - their primary business model is to run platforms to collect user data. They then sell user data both directly and by running the second largest targeted ad network.

              Their public stance they made when renaming themselves meta is “we found out social networks have a lifecycle, and we want to get ahead of the curve and create/capture the platforms people are moving to”

              There’s plenty more to say about Facebook and big companies entering the fediverse but I kinda feel like anyone who is reading this understands the issue to a significant extent

      • misk@sopuli.xyz
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        11 months ago

        If they opened as read only then they created API in a most convoluted way possible. If that ridonculous claim is true then I wonder when we see first third party Threads apps.

      • dumpsterlid@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Just a nice high five for them not falling for corporate embrace and extinguish bullshit when it is in the embrace phase!

    • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I’m constantly reminded of it by instagram when they insert the most unhinged incendiary thread posts on my feed. Quite a way to advertise. “Hey, do you like to be angry and argue with strangers? Come join Threads!”

          • SeducingCamel@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            I just got into photography and wanted to post some stuff to Flickr. Any idea how pixelfed is for that? I really like being able to sort by camera or lens and seeing the exact settings used right under the pic

            • Masimatutu@mander.xyz
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              11 months ago

              I’d say Pixelfed is great for photography; unlike Instagram its userbase is actually photography-focused, but unfortunately you cannot count on people to include all details in their posts.

              • SeducingCamel@lemm.ee
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                11 months ago

                I’ll probably just go for that, if it’s already photography focused that sounds great

                • Masimatutu@mander.xyz
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                  11 months ago

                  Good luck! Remember to hashtag your posts generously at first, because there’s no algorithm!

      • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        Considering a significant portion of their userbase adores ragebait, it probably works out quite well for them lol

    • misk@sopuli.xyz
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      11 months ago

      Mastodon.social, the biggest instance ran by Mastodon devs didn’t and encourages wait and see approach.

    • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      Is there a list of instance somewhere that we can pick from? I thought someone was putting together a list.

          • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            If mastodon federates poorly with Lemmy, I can only imagine that threads will federate even worse with Lemmy.

            That’s assuming that Threads (meta) starts federating with all the fediverse, which is a big assumption.

            My own opinion, based on nothing, is that they will federate with a few handpicked mastodon instances and block everything else. Mainly due to content moderation.

            • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              Mainly due to content moderation.

              The ironic part is that the server that I’m on (pawb.fun) is blocking threads not just because of privacy and security concerns but also because Facebook run services have horrible content moderation.

              They’re really not one to judge other people’s moderation when they basically do the absolute bare minimum to not be considered an alt-right think tank, and even that’s being pretty generous if you’ve ever seen some of the shit that’s posted on Facebook before.

              • capital@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Re: the privacy concerns. Are those people aware that anyone can see their profile and posts at any time?

                That point never made any sense whatsoever.

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      A lot of instances did, the flagship instances run by the Devs of Mastodon didn’t. They think that it’s good and want to encourage it, though at the same time their instances have a spam problem so bad many instances have decided to limit them, making it harder to follow people if your account is on them.

      Also noticed that many people say they won’t follow people who are on Mastodon.social or approve follow requests. Which is a bit extreme but I also get it, there’s lots of spambots and not great people on those instances and moderation is slow since they’re so big which doesn’t really help.

    • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      some do.

      I have a small community masto instance and don’t. If my users want to block the instance, it’s literally 2 clicks and a confirmation away.

      Doing to server wide is massively patronizing towards the users

      • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Nah, users can vote and then if they don’t get the vote they want, they can go to another instance.

      • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        I see it as just virtue signaling. At the end, we can choose to not join those servers who defederate with them, but I can also think it’s a stupid decision at the same time lol.

      • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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        You might want to look up what patronize means, in the common phrase “don’t patronize me” it’s used sarcastically.

        Essentially, replace the word with “helpful” in your sentence, and you’ll see why it doesn’t fit.

        • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
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          11 months ago

          yeah, I get what you mean. But it’s still mostly fitting in the way I feel about it. Basically: users can think for themselves. They don’t need me to take care of the bit scary world out there.

          Doing so for a whole instance feels super condecending. “I know better than you what you want. I’m going to block it”

          • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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            11 months ago

            I get what you meant, which is why I replied, I’m saying that that word means the opposite of what you intended.

            To patronize someone is not a bad thing, the word means “to be someone’s customer/patron” and through doing so, supporting and helping them. That’s where patreons name comes from, for example.

            In the phrase “don’t patronize me” it’s used sarcastically to say “I know you’re trying to help, but please don’t” but the word doesn’t actually refer to someone who is going over your head to do things for you. It’s actual meaning is 100% positive, and hence confuses what you’re saying. Which is that blocking threads should be done by users because it should be their decision.

            Instead, your final sentences literal meaning, paraphrased, is “a server-wide block would be really good and helpful for all my users”.

  • dumpsterlid@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Hi everyone, I am collecting preemptive pikachu faces for when meta inevitably attempts to screw the fediverse over. Please put them in replies to this comment so we don’t clutter up the rest of the comments.

    • 7heo@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago
      • 1999, XMPP is born. 👶
      • 2005, Google launches “Talk”, touted as a “great victory for XMPP”, with “large-scale XMPP services”.
      • 2012, Google encourages “Talk” users to switch to “Hangouts”.
      • 2013, Google drops open XMPP interoperability with other servers.
      • 2015, Google begins shutting down “Talk” clients.
      • 2017, previous phase is now complete, XMPP is virtually unheard of.
      • 2022, Google shuts down all XMPP integration. XMPP is, for all intents an purposes, dead. 🪦

      • 2016, Mastodon is born. 👶
      • 2023, Meta launches “Thread”, touted as a great victory for Mastodon. ← You are here.
      • 2030, Meta encourages “Thread” users to switch to “Fabric”.
      • 2031, Meta drops open ActivityPub interoperability with other servers.
      • 2033, Meta begins shutting down “Thread” clients.
      • 2035, previous phase is now complete, Mastoson is virtually unheard of.
      • 2040, Meta shuts down all Mastodon integration. Mastodon is, for all intents an purposes, dead. 🪦

      N.B.: The delays in the timeline were copied over verbatim. Historical conditions have to be taken into account, as the popular adoption of internet began in the late 2000s. So it is likely for the “extinguish” phase of Mastodon to happen much faster. I give it 5 years tops. And by 2030, we will all remember it as we now remember XMPP.

      • realharo@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        2017, previous phase is now complete, XMPP is virtually unheard of.

        So it returned back to a state where it would have been without Google anyway.

        All the Jabber clients and services combined were never even close to rivaling ICQ, AIM, MSN, Skype, or whatever else ruled the IM space back then.

        • 7heo@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          So it returned back to a state where it would have been without Google anyway.

          The state before Google was “up and coming solution for federated chat”

          The state after Google was “impractical solution that does not federate¹ properly, and is hard to set up²”.

          Those are not the same.

          1: because of Google.
          2: because of Google.

          • realharo@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            Users don’t care about federation. For them, there is no such category as “federated chat”. There is only “chat”.

            XMPP never had significant market share among the instant messengers of the time (except maybe as custom solutions for work chat, but not as a consumer service).

            • 7heo@lemmy.ml
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              11 months ago

              Yeah, of course it would have not ever been a mainstream thing for end users. But Google definitely nipped them in the bud, both by providing a (bogus) drive behind the XMPP development (and so, preventing anyone else from doing so), and also by kickstarting them into relative widespread use instead of letting them grow organically.

              If they had, there is a possibility XMPP would have become a service provided by nerds for their friends and family as soon as 2010, like email, or more recently, nextcloud.

              And it would have been a valid option for corporate solutions. But no, instead, we got slack. Thanks, Google.

    • Tertle950@lemmy.basedcount.com
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      11 months ago

      Hold your ground men, stay on non-corpo socials (here)!

      They can’t really do anything they couldn’t already do if we do that.

    • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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      11 months ago

      Please could you tell me what success looks like for ActivityPub if it doesn’t involve adoption?

      • Olgratin_Magmatoe@startrek.website
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        It’ll look like what we already have. Swaths of users self hosting, with lots of redundancy to deal woth instances that have problems.

        And that might mean it needs to stay small, but that’s OK. Not all success is measured in popularity.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Staying free, open, and undriven by this idea of a shareholder that will destroy anything good in the pursuit of profit.

  • misk@sopuli.xyz
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    11 months ago

    Pretty cool. I keep saying that this is a win for open standards and Meta probably does this to appease EU regulators. It’s no surprise that this happens as Threads launches In Europe.

      • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
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        I see it as an opportunity to tell people on Threads to leave Threads and use an open platform, such as Mastodon, instead. Then eventually Threads will shut down, because everyone moved :D

        • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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          Won’t they have control over their instance though? I’m sure they’re going to run it like Reddit and shadow ban the shit out of their users and also not let them see certain stuff.

      • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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        You mean as instance blocking? Because the Lemmy devs have stated that it’s not going to work the way everybody’s assuming it’s going to work.

        So far the way that it’s been laid out it’ll only block communities on that Lemmy Instance, users will not be filtered.

        That’s ignoring the fact that Lemmy’s blocking system is already flawed in it’s design and isn’t really an effective tool against malicious users.

        So we really shouldn’t treat blocking even of instances as personal defederation, because it isn’t and unless something really changes and Lemmy’s development it never will be. You can on Mastodon because Mastodon’s blocking system is much harsher as well as the fact that federation highly depends on following, but lemmy works much differently and also has a significantly weaker blocking system (I should also add it does not respect mastodon’s blocking system) so because of that being able to block instances should not and cannot be considered an alternative to defederation, especially when it comes to malicious instances.

    • ryan@the.coolest.zone
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      Agreed. Instances always have the option to defederate with Threads should it prove spammy or ad-filled or socially awful, but I’m cautiously optimistic that Threads will pave the way for a more open social media paradigm in general. Decentralization is a core tenet of Web3, and everyone started focusing on the block chain and Bitcoins and whatnot but there’s so much more to decentralization than that.

      • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Why in the world are you cautiously optimistic? What would give you the idea that meta would do anything but what’s in their shareholder’s interest. My biggest question is, do we know if activitypub is secure enough to keep them out of its software?

        • dumpsterlid@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I don’t think it’s fair to preemptively assume meta is going to be evil here, where is the evidence?

          If a bear was charging you that you had just watched murder a bunch of people would you just assume it was going to attack you? What evidence would you have for that?

          Personally, I think large tech corporations have a wonderful track record with treating the public commons as a shared resource to nurture and maintain not a coal vein in the ground to ruthlessly extract :)

      • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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        11 months ago

        Though this is more federation with a wheel and spoke model than true decentralization where each pier communicates with other piers directly. Each have their place for sure, but they cannot be interchanged because they are not the same thing.

    • sverit@feddit.de
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      11 months ago

      Pretty cool at first glance. Not so cool when they have pulled in enough users and then remove the federation.

      • misk@sopuli.xyz
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        11 months ago

        They have orders of magnitude more users than all Mastodon instances combined already.

        • Ashe@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          11 months ago

          Part of that is only because any and all Instagram accounts are also considered Threads accounts. I have a feeling active users is probably in a similar ballpark

          • misk@sopuli.xyz
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            11 months ago

            BS. There are 140 mil Threads accounts and over 2 bil Instagram accounts. You can create Threads account with Instagram and for a time they couldn’t be decouple but that changed too.

  • Clbull@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I wouldn’t be too worried about Threads joining the fediverse.

    They had the perfect opportunity to dethrone X with a superior app but have given users the most barebones piece of shit that doesn’t even have support for hashtags or trending topics.

    Mastodon has this functionality.

    Last time I booted up Threads, my feed was flooded with e-girls posting twerking videos. I don’t follow any such accounts on Threads nor Instagram and I don’t like it when my social media feels like a softcore porn platform.

    • nutsack@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      it’s also doing a lot better than Mastodon because they integrated it with Instagram

  • mr_tyler_durden@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think this is actually a great thing for Mastodon. The truth is the majority of people are just never going to sign up for a Mastodon server as they stand today. The majority of people want algorithmic feeds run by a central entity. I know the people here don’t want that, but that’s what the majority of people do want. Will I use Threads? No but if this breathes more life into Mastodon and exposes more people to the concept then that is a good thing. Being able to use a client of your choice to interact with people on something like Threads is also a very good thing. The alternative is a completely closed social network like Twitter.

    I know, I know “embrace, extend, extinguish”, but literally this is the best that we can hope for unfortunately. The alternative is everyone goes and uses a closed system.

    • shapis@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Google the history of xmpp. This is exactly the same.

      It’s not a good thing.

      • mr_tyler_durden@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        So we can let Mastodon die on the vine or chance it dying? Ok, I know my choice.

        It’s not like the majority of people are already on open protocols. I’m sure Threads dwarfs Masrodon usage just as Twitter and possibly even BlueSky.

        IF Mastodon was dominate I might have a different view but it’s not. If Threads federates then there is an opportunity to push people to other clients which make switching to a Mastodon/ActivityPub server much easier. That’s literally only upside. It’s not like the people on Mastodon now are going to leave it for Threads.

        • Sanyanov@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          They might end up being forced to, should Threads decide to revert.

          Mastodon users will inevitably hook up on Threads communities instead of fostering their own, and at that point being left to their own devices would be a catastrophe.

          And yes, this is exactly what happened to xmpp.

    • Mwalimu@baraza.africa
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      11 months ago

      What is the obsession with numbers? Centralization mentality is the problem. The idea that unless 5 Billion people are on a network will it be “successful” denies the joys of effective and sustainable networks. I really honestly wouldn’t want to see a fediverse server with more than 100K daily active users. I would rather have 10 instances of 10K active users.

      Meta and those billionaire centrists can go fuck themselves.

      • InvaderDJ@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I wouldn’t call it an obsession, but there does need to be a critical mass of users before a social networks become useful.

    • arc@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      I’m not sure. Might be a great thing, but Facebook might equally be the equivalent of a whale landing in a small pond, killing everything else in the process.

  • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
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    11 months ago

    I don’t see the issue. For all those concerned about privacy: you know you are posting in public space? Anyone can scrape the posts however they want. Which is a key aspect of openness btw.

    On the other hand, by leaving Threads in would show other companies the concept of a global community instead of multple closed groups. The companies could save on moderation costs Reddit-Style that way, but open.

    • Eccitaze@yiffit.net
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      11 months ago

      You need to learn your Internet history. It wasn’t so long ago that we had a diverse, interoperable community of instant messaging platforms based on XMPP, an open, federated protocol. Anybody could host their own XMPP server, and communicate with any other XMPP server. Then in 2006, Google added XMPP support to their Talk app and integrated it into the Gmail web interface. But there were problems:

      First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing. They were not implementing everything. This forced XMPP development to be slowed down, to adapt. Nice new features were not implemented or not used in XMPP clients because they were not compatible with Google Talk (avatars took an awful long time to come to XMPP). Federation was sometimes broken: for hours or days, there would not be communications possible between Google and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers, posting irregularities and downtime (I did it several times, which is probably what prompted the job offer).

      And because there were far more Google talk users than “true XMPP” users, there was little room for “not caring about Google talk users”. Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.

      Only a few years later, Google would discontinue Google Talk, migrated all their users to Hangouts, and decimated the XMPP community in an instant. Most of the Google users never noticed, outside of some invalid contacts in their list.

      That’s why everyone distrusts Meta. Even with Threads being a relatively unsuccessful platform by commercial social media standards, its active userbase still dwarfs the entire Fediverse combined. There’s absolutely nothing stopping Meta from running the exact same playbook:

      • Add ActivityPub support, but only partially

      • Add new features to ActivityPub without consulting with the rest of the Fediverse or documenting the extensions, degrading the experience for everyone not using Threads

      • Entice Fediverse users to migrate to Threads–after all, why use Mastodon or Lemmy when 95%+ of ActivityPub traffic originates from Threads?

      • Deprecate ActivityPub support after most of the Fediverse is on Threads, leaving it smaller and more fragmented than if Threads had never federated at all, while forcing everyone who migrated from another Fediverse platform to Threads into an impossible choice between abandoning the vast majority of their contacts or subjecting themselves to Meta’s policies, tracking, and moderation

  • farcaster@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Ok, so what is actually the main argument people have to preventatively defederate with Threads? I perhaps haven’t thought about it much, but I don’t personally see the problem if my instances would federate with them. I’m mentally comparing this to email. If I ran my own email service, or used someone else’s, why would I want to block Gmail, or icloud, or Hotmail/Outlook?

    Of course if they don’t have effective admin/moderation policies and actions then, yeah they should be blocked or limited. The same holds true with email federation.

      • farcaster@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Thanks, that’s actually precisely what I was interested in reading. That admin team totally rocks for motivating their decision with such a comprehensive argument.

    • spiderman@ani.social
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      11 months ago

      The content on threads are utter garbage. I have tried to get on with it but it doesn’t seem to work out for me.

    • pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      I think the issue is that on most people’s feeds, the vast, vast majority of the content that they see would be from the @threads “instance.” Think of how salty people get about the size of mastodon.social or lemmy.world are compared to other instances, and multiply that along with the threat of a poison pill in the form of corporate embrasure.

      Culturally, the fedi is pretty anti-corporate, so a lot of members are suspicious of centralization / partnership with corporate entities. Though this lens, I think the objections make total sense.