I sincerely hope Threads follows through with their plan to federate. It will give other Fediverse users a controlled pipeline to the zeitgeist.
By judiciously following Threaders here we’ll be able to have safe access to the people, news, and brands we could never convince to use Mastodon without having to submerse ourselves into the massive, undifferentiated flood of info over there.
@leo Agreed. I also think Meta is using ActivityPub with Threads as a way to deflect the eventual regulation issues from Meta owning Instagram, Facebook, and possibly the new Twitter.
@leo I think #Meta / #Threads will come up with subtle ways to abuse #ActivityPub to inflict a slow torture on existing #Mastodon/ #Akkoma/etc admins - drawing them into supporting Threads' quirky implementation of it. Like #Google did to #XMPP. This now-established playbook manouvre is way too juicy to pass up using again.
Then once this "drift" from the consistency in ActivityPub compliance is set - like a disease - then Threads will stop supporting ActivityPub, adding insult to injury.
Keep in mind this is a company that made ghost accounts for people that never even signed up for their service, based on the accounts of their friends and relatives.
If you care about the privacy of your data, no, this is not a good thing. If you don't care about that, then...sure.
@leo This reminds me of when AOL opened up to the internet. One day we all realized that we no longer needed it, and eventually having an aol.com email address was embarrassing or a joke.
If meta can't control it's nazis or floods other instances with unnecessary crap like a DOS attack or whatever, then they'll get defederated. Otherwise, people will slowly drift out to instances with cooler domain names that don't advertise and where you can control your timeline.
@leo Serious question. Is that the problem with the fediverse, that there’s no pipeline to the zeitgeist? Obviously I’m considering the very same thing and my assumption is that that’s just a matter of configuration.
@leo Hold them to simple requirements... like not appending an ad to someone on Threads' posting - so it appears WITHIN someone's post who I follow, and maybe I'd consider it.
Make them promise to NOT shadow profile those of us who follow their members.
BOTH of those things can be done by Meta right now, they're simple to implement, and they scare the hell outta me! 😳
@leo Maybe I should doff my tinfoil hat, but I am worried about Facebook pulling an embrace-extend-extinguish maneuver like MS and Google did with web browsers. If they capture users and then wall them off behind proprietary extensions to AP before nixing AP support entirely, we're right back where we started.
@leo it’s my hope all services like this eventually become like email through federation. We can block the spammers and the scammers and then pick whatever platform or server we want that has the features we like.
@leo Threads is the accelerator for Twitter’s eventual demise. The sooner it’s toast, the better. Threads is not the “twitter replacement” we hope for, nor is Mastodon even though we love it for the community and conversation with twitter-like features. But that’s everywhere today. What we’re missing is a solid, noise-free (no replies), public announcement service (think: emergency broadcast system) for federal/state/county disaster alerts exclusively. Hello, USDS.gov?
@leo I don't think it will work out that way, unfortunately. Threads' apparent FB-like moderation policy means bad actors there will never have action taken against them.
I'm so excited to see you, @leo taking a different approach to having Thread users take part in the fediverse and not de-federating all of their users.
Giving Mastodon users access to Threads users (and visa-versa) could be really beneficial for our community.
I think we will need to come up with some good moderation strategies (thinking of being able to subscribe to moderation lists) that don't lump all of one instance's users into one big group or moderation will be a problem.
@leo I like the idea, but I don't trust Meta to do this unless they benefit from it somehow. What that benefit is currently, I'm not sure. Messenger once supported XMPP which was removed down the road, so I'm also not convinced they'll commit to it long term.
@leo I think so, but the real fear always is that Zuck's influence forces/bullies the fediverse to either become something it shouldn't or be excluded.
@leo Meta will only support Federation until they they can stop supporting Federation, it's a false flag operation to stem the flow from Facebook and make Meta seem benign.
Do you remember when Facebook could produce and consume rss? Most don't.
I still have pictures of an outline architecture diagram for a presentation to Gavin Newsome's office when he was Mayor of SF back in 2008/9. The proposal was to use RSS to create content and move between social media platforms.
@leo
That is the first step of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"
We all thought that same thing when yahoo took over for private forums, and cheered while google divided up email to "save us" from spam, and (google again) thought it was absolutely amazing "do no evil" when they federated google talk with XMPP. (That one really stung. And it was exactly this situation: they connected their existing chat network to the existing largish federated one, and when they had enough of a user-base they defederated to destroy the open network. It worked. Gtalk people thought we just logged off..)
They can get the data for free by simply spinning a 'fake' instance and subscribing like mad. They can't get the users unless they change the #fediverse to something it is not.
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