A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.
However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don’t have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.
What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it’d be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.
What actions can we take to deal with Threads?
Some food for thought from Mastodon:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
@panja
Meta is going to kill the Fediverse and it’s all probably a part of Zuck’s grand plan.
I’m not sure how you know that?
They’re not going to kill it because we’re not going to let them… what’s with the nihilism? If you’re gonna resign that easily just go ahead and download tiktok and instagram and give away all your data today.
One of the worst parts from the “article” which is wildly misdirecting:
This is most probably decidedly false. Meta has always and will probably continue to collects whatever data they can, they build databases of relations, and collect not only on their users, but also the people their users have contact with.
If you write a message to a Threads user, you can be pretty sure as much as possible from that message is collected. Not just the message, but also any metadata that can be used to identify you and any context you are in.
Meta gets all the data as well, even if all people defederate.
ActivityPub has it in the name. All your activities in the fediverse are public.
The article talks about private data saved on your phone like health data, contacts etc. Threads takes those, Mastodon app does not.
Yes you are right, it was a brainfart on my part.
Eugen’s naïveté is going to destroy this whole platform.
Yeah, I’d like to see an actual explanation of why the Fediverse is insulated from EEE aside from ‘Mastodon brand recognition’.
I think by brand recognition they don’t necessary mean “mastodon is a known brand so it’ll be fine”, rather that mastodon is a big enough brand for their voice to be heard… I imagine that it’ll end up being like mozilla and google with the w3c, where even if one is far more open and collects less data than the other while also having fewer users, they still agree to and collaborate to create the same standards, and users can disable these
In the grand scheme, though, no one uses either mastodon or lemmy. I’m sure, to the devs and people who joined before 2021, that a couple million users seems like an enormous victory (and it is), but relative to a half billion twitters, the 1.5 billion instagrammers, or even the 5+M that signed up for Threads on the first day, it’s nothing.
Those Threads users aren’t part of Lemmy or Mastodon, they’re part of Threads. They don’t have to know what Lemmy or Mastodon are, even as they benefit from content created there. Once Threads is big enough, they either DOS non-corporate instances with mountains of data, disable those instances with protocol-breaking customizations, or just ignore them because all the biggest communities and content are hosted at Threads.
When mozilla & google started working together, Firefox was the majority browser and chrome a ridiculous upstart trying to squeeze into a domain dominated by IE and FF. The fediverse does not have mozilla’s power in that analogy. I mean, fediverse may survive after that, but the commercial players will absolutely siphon off anyone who cares more about the user experience and content than about privacy on a public forum, which probably means the user base of July 2022, not July 2023.
Half a billion Twitter users? At its peak Twitter had 300 million monthly users. Or are you talking total number of Twitter accounts, even the ones that have been lying dormant since 2016?
Twitter has always been an also-ran as a social media site. Despite being a “major” and “international” site, its peak user count was smaller than a lot of strictly-regional social media sites. Sina Weibo, for example, was until recently regarded as a failure because it had “only” 600 million active users, and that’s a single-nation site for all practical purposes, against Twitter’s “international” membership. (With a major cash and marketing push from new owners Ali, Weibo has grown quite a bit since those failure days, mind. It still has only about 600 million active users, but it’s become quite an influential social hub at the expense of Tencent’s QZone.)
Yes, isolate me from those scary non-Threads instances daddy