When Meta launched their new Twitter competitor Threads on July 5, they said that it would be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon, and all the other decentralized social networks in the fediverse “soon”.
But on July 14, @alexeheath of the Verge reported that Meta’s saying ActivityPub integration’s “a long way out”. Hey wait a second. Make up your mind already!
From the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say “a long way out” is a clear victory for the free fediverse’s cause.
It’s almost as if the entire point of Threads was to use the Twitter hate to harvest more personal data with zero interest in creating an actual longstanding platform. 🤔
“almost”
Threads is pretty blatant about censorship and sharing of user data. They use terms like “a friendly space” and “convenient” to sell it to users. So you’re actually losing something by jumping ship from Twitter. The one positive for Musk era Twitter was an attempt to reduce censorship, but the crazy things the company did otherwise far outweigh it.
One of the shitty things profit driven social media sites do is curate content to create a more advertiser friendly space. It even extends to special interests and government interests. I mean what do you call that when public information is curated by the government. I sure as hell don’t want my US government telling me what I can and can not discuss in a public venue.
In the USA there’s a little thing called the first amendment. Granted these are companies and don’t necessarily have to adhere to civil rights in the same way government agencies do, but in effect they’re doing the same thing. The US government should absolutely not be coercing these US companies into censoring content, which they are.
🙄 “Saying slurs on a private forum is mah god-given right!”
There’s plenty to criticize about Twitter and Threads, but the unmoderated parts of the internet are cancer.
Also pretending that Elon doesn’t remove things he doesn’t like is a joke.
I could have made that a lot longer, but I just wanted make a few points without creating a wall of text.
Of course there’s garbage you don’t want to see in a community. But the difference is there’s an actual human being I entrust to the task of removing it (the moderator). If I don’t like how a community is moderated, I can go to another community. Mods make these calls for the sake of quality and topicality of their particular community, not because of some ulterior motive.
This is in comparison to an institution of some kind using keyword algorithms to mindlessly remove intelligent discussion only because it may be against some kind of predetermined policy. The US government does this. They have official agents placed within the staff of major social media outlets for this purpose.
The only thing I said about Musk is that it’s a positive he tried to reduce censorship. I never implied that he removed censorship altogether. Twitter is still guilty of curating content same as the others. However Threads has flat out stated a full tilt censorship agenda.
Can you provide some evidence for your claim of US agents on staff for censorship purposes, as well as elaborate on which speech you believe is being removed?
99% of the time I see people upset about ‘censorship’ of online spaces, they’re mad about far-right hate-speech or dangerous misinformation.
Well I’m not wikipedia here, just going on things I’ve read in past. You can either believe it or not believe it, suit yourself.
In the pre-internet days it was a well known fact that major media outlets in the USA had federal officials on staff to put the kibosh on issues of national security. That criteria has since broadened. For anyone that still watches news media on TV they can see for themselves the stories that never get past the editorial desk.
I’ve read claims of the same federal scrutiny happening for large social media outlets. These are USA companies operating in the USA so they fall under jurisdiction. They’re certainly not going to advertise that’s the case. I don’t doubt this is happening for a second and in their own best interest they keep it on the downlow.
I’m not sure I understand the comment. You meant 99% of those complaining are posting hostile shit? If so, it’s the 1% that post intelligent and legitimate counter arguments we need to allow a voice. It’s not uncommon for legislation to push through under the guise of some public benefit that further erodes our civil liberty. As US citizens we need to be vigilant about that kind of thing or we’re just throwing our freedom away.
So, nothing that any of us can research for ourselves? Odd. Well known facts shouldn’t be hard to cite…
Well known facts from the pre-internet days, no less. You know, back when everything was recorded in physical books. Sadly all of those records have been lost. Tin foil hat sad face.
using keyword algorithms to mindlessly remove intelligent discussion only because it may be against some kind of predetermined policy. The US government does this. They have official agents placed within the staff of major social media outlets for this purpose.
Please please please provide evidence of this one.
No? You’re not going to respond with any evidence at all about anything you said here? Come on man. What a let down. Why do you even write this stuff then?
Of course there’s garbage you don’t want to see in a community. But the difference is there’s an actual human being I entrust to the task of removing it (the moderator). If I don’t like how a community is moderated, I can go to another community. Mods make these calls for the sake of quality and topicality of their particular community, not because of some ulterior motive.
Unless those moderators are getting paid, you are just benefitting from unpaid labor and externalizing the costs of running the community onto volunteers.
That’s why I’m not against algorithmic moderation. The work itself is never going to be paid labor unless social media is nationalized, so it must be automated.
Reduced censorship, so long as what you’re posting paints musk in a positive light, doesn’t upset him, and so long as it’s mostly racist.
Reduced censorship. Lol. No man, just no.
I think they were ever only going to do it if Threads failed.
I think it makes entry into the EU easier, but they’re receiving headwinds on two fronts there. There’s no need for them to implement federation if they can’t overcome the other regulatory hurdles first.
Yep. Federation could conceivably respond to the EU’s requirement for interoperability – and they could do it in a way that puts a lot of barriers to people actually moving, so works well for them. Of course the EU would say that didn’t meet the requirement, which would lead to a multi-year legal battle and eventually Meta would probably pay a billion dollar fine (as they routinely do – it’s just a cost of doing business) and promise to remove the barriers (which they wouldn’t, and then there would be another multi-year legal battle).
But none of that works if the EU won’t allow Threads for some other reason!
Still, my guess is that they’ll figure out a way around the EU’s objections to Threads … we shall see …
Imagine of the EU mandated all social networks to be interoperable…
Like “standard phone calls have always been interoperable” ?
Like “batteries should be replaceable” ?
Or “documents file formats should be open” ?
ActivityPub should probably become a login standard, somehow as standard as SAML. Any social network should propose to login with AP, just like any social let you use email or phone number to register.
Yes all of those. I think Cory Doctorow calls it crecom or something like that
Still, my guess is that they’ll figure out a way around the EU’s objections to Threads
I think it’s more likely that they’ll hope demand is high enough that the EU is forced to let them in.
I think we’re in violent agreement here: getting the EU to drop their objections is certainly one way around them! So yeah, they’ll probably try to use the demand for Threads to push back on the DMA’s anti-trust-ish provisions (which as I understand is the current blockage). And then they’ll try to use their ActivityPub integration to push back on the interoperability requirements, no doubt characterizing them as unrealistic. It’s predictable but still irritating.
yeah, they’ll need to fix a lot of their permissions if they want to get into the EU - which is probably a much higher concern than some piddly mastodon users.
Nah, what would be the point of keeping Threads around then? They’d shut it down as soon as user numbers got too low. Same as what happened with G+
Agree, if Threads majorly flops they’d just pull the plug, add they’ve done before.
I still don’t get their target audience for Threads.
Facebook users don’t want to leave their weird boomer Internet bubble. Instagram users will continue posting pictures on Instagram and advertise their
linktr.eeaccount where they link to their 18+ content because they’re not allowed to link in directly from Instagram, and 𝕏 users … well … they will continue using 𝕏.Ironically the only ones wo really care about Threads is people in the Fediverse.
I think they may have realised that federating whilst they’re still not allowed to operate in the EU would hand hundreds of millions of EU users to independent instances.
I’ll stop fighting when Meta no longer exists.
I’ll stop when capitalism and governments no longer exist.
(By government, I mean the institution of a group of rulers and attendant enforcement, used to compel others to do what they would otherwise not).
Governments will always exist. Sorry to burst that bubble. They always have and they always will.
Lmao you think there were governments when early humans were wandering around the plains of Africa in tiny little tribes?
E: Downvote all you want but by the definitions being proposed here then all species have governments because they snatch food from one another, which is an immensely asinine description of ‘government’ since it describes and means effectively NOTHING
Tribalism is a form of government hate to break it to you…
As long as there is a limited supply of resources there will be some form of economic distribution and a government to settle disputes about that distribution.
If you argue that any attempt to resolve an economic dispute(that apple is mine!) is through government, then yes, they will exist as long as we do.
Yeah, the fatalism is sad.
People lack both the knowledge to realize that different forms of society already existed (and do, currently), and imagination to realize that it’s possible to move towards a different and better form.
So you want to reduce humanity by 99%? Because hunter gatherer lifestyle isn’t sustainable with more than 100 million people.
Oh and you also want to go back to a life expectancy of 40 years, barely any useful medicine, exorbitant child mortality, countless women dying at birth and the constant fear that your surroundings will kill you.
Sounds great!
Huh??? I never advocated for going back to a pre-agriculture society society at all, i was pushing back against the idea that governments ‘have always existed’ because of course they haven’t, that’s patently absurd since they are social constructs
You’re right, I didn’t look at the usernames and thought you were op, arguing that we don’t need governments and can go back to tribes. Sorry :/
Source?
Human history. The oldest history of humanity we have is the Sumerians. From that time on every large group of people formed a government. Babylon. Arkadian. Egyptian. Greek.
Other forms of government are tribes. Hunters. Gatherers. Those are tribes.
Show us people that didn’t have a form of government and we’ll be impressed.
I see, if you define government as “any collection of humans,” than yes, it’s always been extant.
What I meant, however, was a group of rulers that use force to compel others to do what they would otherwise not.
Written history is also a blip terms of the duration of the history of humanity, too. Something like 1%. We can access some of the rest via anthropology.
Yes. Those types of people have always been around. Have you never read history before? You can aCkuALY all you want to, I don’t care. I’d rather you left that shit attitude at reddit, though.
Ah, that’s just the point - the types of people have been around for awhile, but the institutions supporting them — backing militias, basically — have not.
You’re out of line. If anyone has the reddit attitude of casting aspersions rather than rebut effectively, it is you.
That’s called a state, governments are the state’s employees
Called it. I’d be prepared to bet that in a few more weeks, Meta’s just gonna quietly drop the idea of ActivityPub integration all together. To me at least, it always seemed like the whole “planned Fediverse integration” for Threads was just them trying to jump on what they saw as the latest buzzword bandwagon.
Had Threads been released a few months earlier, you can bet they’d have been talking about “Metaverse integration” instead.
Every “mainstream” (ie: not tech focused) source I have seen discussing threads has been keenly missing the whole federation component and focused on it being a twitter replacement competition.
The whole federation thing is probably too abstract for most.
Could definitely see this, plus trying to capitalize on the exodus of users from reddit.
When a company says “a long way out” it often ends up meaning “never”. Fingers crossed.
I don’t trust them. So this means nothing.
I don’t trust them either, and they’re very likely to move ahead with federation anyhow. It still means something that they’re changing the story that they’re telling.
Honestly this is why the whole “Meta will kill the fediverse” thing people were saying never really convinced me. They just don’t seem to care, I mean it’s been a month and they still have no real plans to actually federate.
A month isn’t very long, they haven’t even figured out their basic features - this was more a “maybe later this year” timeframe. It could be done quickly if they decided to start by reproducing mastodon and going from there, but building something that federates but is highly monetizable takes time - honestly they were probably pleased by the numbers and decided to go for monetization first
Making it clear they are unwelcome was the point though.
It seems they’ve put the idea on the back burner after we largely made our position clear, but it’s not unlikely that they try to quietly federate down the road… Every time they think about it, we have to make them believe this would be more trouble than it’s worth
I personally believe that Meta never intended Threads to be support Activitypub and just chose it so they could do the bare minimum to comply with the EU digital markets act.
Given how evil they are, this definitely seems plausible (although threats isn’t available in the EU and they are actively preventing usage in the EU). Another option is that they’re still out to kill the fediverse. That one honestly seems more likely to me, given how they’ve acted in the past (buying up platforms before they could outcompete them).
@nave @theneverfox believing is not knowing is speculation is not helping
I mean, this is my area of expertise. Sure, it’s speculation, but it’s educated speculation. I’m intimately familiar with activity pub and the way large projects are brought into existence
Plus, following my recommendation if I’m wrong would at most be a slight amount of wasted effort, but ignoring it if I’m right could be a huge problem.
I’d call that helpful
This is an incredible read on why Threads federating is bad news: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is the 1004th time I am seeing people mentioning this article.
I mentioned it 3 times in this last day since I read it! Maybe it is spreading.
I do it because I think it is the most important point on the fediverse. The fediverse is a tool of freedom, morals, ethics, for those that want to be connected, something that no commercial entity will offer. And it’s ok for it to not grow at all costs, or be the widespread available platform. It just needs to be present and faithful to itself.
I keep seeing this article posted to scare people, but Lemmy and Mastodon aren’t in the same situation as XMPP. XMPP had barely any users outside of Google Talks, with the overwhelming majority of interactions on XMPP being between Google Talks users. Google was tying their product to a public standard that they couldn’t develop however they wanted, all for compatibility with very few users. When they pulled out of using XMPP to develop their own platform, the sheer lack of users on XMPP outside of Google Talks became apparent. This will not be the case with Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/ect. Mastodon has 10 million registered users, and Lemmy has hundreds of thousands. The majority of both service’s users are not about to switch over to sell their soul to the Zucc, so if Facebook federates for a while before defederating, Lemmy and Mastodon will have as large and robust communities as they have now, and the services will live on unlike with XMPP
Comes to mind that personally I had no commitment to Jabber or Pidgin, it was only a means to talk to people I wanted to talk, which I remained able to do after they were dropped. But Lemmy and Mastodon are communities, it takes more than tinkering with the protocol to kill it.
They would have to convince people who are here because they are already sick of Big Tech social media, that going back to Meta, of all places, is the right move. If they can do that, then it’s not a matter of EEE or whatever, it’s that we failed to maintain a compelling community.
I believe in this place more than that. Which is why I believe that if integration came to pass, it’s more likely that we would gain users, who would peek through the Meta windows and notice that we are having a better experience.
Our content will be drowned by the amount of content a mainstream Meta can output.
And if you would like for users to notice the free fediverse among that content, they would need to ignore all Meta/commercial communities. That’s not practical. It also amounts to defederating with Meta, which is practical, and what is suggested anyways. If people are curious about the free fediverse they will hear about it and find it.
Defederating isn’t the threat - the situation you describe would hurt the fediverse, but it would survive as you said.
You’re missing the far more insidious piece - changing the standards
So let’s say we have mastodon servers, threads, and maybe another player or two.
Context for my example - Lemmy and mastodon use paths, 0.<root post id>.<reply>.<reply reply>.<etc>
Facebook decides “path isn’t good enough for what we want, we’re changing the first number, always 0, and we’re going to set it to a number from 1 to 100000 that will encode topic, work appropriateness, and sentiment analysis into this value”.
Being the majority of the network, suddenly mastodon either throws out the threads content or the clients start breaking - the fix would be simple, but until that happens either they temporarily defederate or apps start crashing.
Either way, people are pissed - either their busy feed has suddenly gone quiet, or their app no longer works. It gets resolved in a few days, and now apps are able to do better sorting
The takeaway for most people is “mastodon sucked for a few days”
Now let’s say they use this sentiment analysis more deeply for the algorithm. They’ve got AI doing it, hell, they’re even being “good fediverse citizens” and running it on mastodon posts for free. Everything works better, you find stuff better, nsfw posts are better flagged, the clients add cool new features around it
Now, let’s say Facebook decides “mastodon is costing us server time, and we don’t make much off them. Let’s just show more threads content and only show replies and the top thousand mastodon posts each hour” Suddenly, mastodon users get much less engagement when they post.
Their takeaway is “mastodon isn’t as good for us as it used to be”
Maybe someone builds an open source system for mastodon to do classification. It’s much more expensive server-wise, so maybe only the top servers do it… But their posts get seen again, and everything is good again. People move to these servers or to threads so they can keep being discovered
Now, let’s say someone at Facebook goes “their classification isn’t as good as ours, and their nsfw tagging isn’t as good. Our advertisers would be pissed if they found out, let’s not sell ads on any post not classified by us just to be safe”. Someone else comes along and says “we’re leaving money on the table here, let’s show less of those posts”.
And kind of like this, these little decisions made with little malice would slowly choke out mastodon. With a dominant player, the little guys don’t need to be targeted - Facebook just has to put themselves first. And if you think a company would consistently pass up on profits or savings for a vague promise as years go by, I don’t know what to tell you
If threads is a more stable experience, only privacy minded people would pick mastodon. Even people that refuse to use threads on principle would be less likely to be active on mastodon
In reality, the decisions and side effects would probably be more subtle than this… But it doesn’t take much. They just have to occasionally make the fediverse feel buggy or unfinished in comparison, and it’ll forever become a place for enthusiasts and never as a serious option by the public at large
I think the u/Kes put it really well. People on fediverse platforms are already staunchly opposed to big tech so they have no reason to leave for platform made by Meta of all people.
It always felt like a backup plan. Or maybe that plan was before they remembered they had 2 billion users on Instagram they could bootstrap off.
It’s ironic, considering how much we’ve been fighting over whether to let Meta in or not.
Fuck me, that’s exactly how society works, some bully doing something, the normal people fighting over it, then the bully going “never mind lol”.
That’s true, although I’ve been saying all along that Threads’ potential arrival is a great opportunity whether or not it happens.
If I don”t want something to happen, I”d much rather a corporation say “a long way out” than “never going to happen”. Something on the back burner of a corporation is as good as dead. Something an exec said no to just needs a change in leadership to make happen.
Oh boy act surprised
I know there’s someone picking up a phone because they called it.
Euuuuh… Is it me or is some parts of the article setting up/opposing LGBTQ+ against non-lgbtq?
“One of the interesting dynamics of the discussion so far is so much of the resistance to Meta has come from queer and trans people, and that most of the loudest supporters of Meta in the fediverse are cis guys.” This sentence may be technicaly right, but it’s
sooooo stupidmostly interpretation. Edit: wrong and uncalled forStarting from there, the article seems to be as much about “us va them” than threads and meta…
Why is it stupid? The article isn’t setting up the tension, it’s describing the tension that exists.
Unless I’m mistaken, if you remove the LGBTQ community everybody that left… Is cis persons. As in general “techy” world, most of the person using fediverse (and it’s currently changing rapidly, which is good) is male.
I may very well be mistaken, but the way this sentence is constructed make it feels like one information is being phrased in a way that fitting a certain point of view.
Anyway, I’m probably over analysing, as usual.
Yes, I certainly constructed the sentence to highlight the different reactions. Later in the article I say “And by prioritizing their desire to be embraced by Meta over queer and trans people’s safety, Meta’s cis advocates undercut their claims to be allies in ways that may be hard to recover from” – which is true no matter what Meta does or doesn’t wind up doing with Threads. Of course it’s not the only thing going on, but I think it’s important enough that it’s worth highlighting.
Good, fuckem
You mean all of the ridiculous bullshit complaining and bragading that has been going on here for weeks was pointless?
Not at all. I talked about this in In chaos there is opportunity! Meta’s potential arrival is a likely to be a good thing for the fediverse no matter whether or not they actually go forward with it.
It was always pointless. If Meta or anyone tries to join Fediverse, there is no stopping them. There will always be some instances that will federate with them.
What Lemmy needs is an instance wide blocking system, so users can themselves decide which instance to block.
Yes totally agree. Give individuals the power to do what they want without assaulting the rest of us would be really nice.
Threads seems to have achieved its immediate strategic goal of setting fire to zombie Twitter so that it’d stay dead; building it into an actual Twitter replacement could take years, and in the meanwhile there’s plenty of time for Mastodon et al to keep hoovering up users too.
Personally, I don’t post anything on Threads, and haven’t really tried to obtain any followers there, but I do log on and view/like content from famous people I used to follow on Twitter in the hopes that if they get enough engagement on Threads they’ll cut out Twitter altogether.
Threads seems worse to me because it is Meta, requires an app, and can’t be look at without an account. At least Twitter has restored visibility to people without accounts and now Twitter front ends are working again. Everything in meta has seemed to be account based with Instagram and Facebook where if someone sends me a links is usually useless since it requires a login. And I’m not creating a meta account. Even tiktok can be viewed without an accoubt or app.
I reminded of the end of season 1 of Foundation, where the Foundation stayed hidden from the empire for a long time, growing in strength and technology.
Season 2 is pretty good so far
Is that series good? I’m not subscribing to Apple TV just for that but I read the first book many years ago and I’m interested on Fundation.
That’s the neat thing, you don’t actually have to subscribe to any of these streaming services in order to watch their shows.
High seas time
yar har
