Lots of people on Mastodon have been losing their shit over Threads joining the fediverse, so I wanted to give my opinion on this whole shit show.
Here’s a very different take on Threads by a Fosstodon admin.
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As an admin of a small instance, the privacy stuff is pretty secondary to the moderation headache Threads’ traffic would surely induce.
mastodon.socialby itself produces enough crap that I’ve silenced them, I can’t imagine that Threads will be any better and indeed assume it’ll be much worse in that regard.Besides that, I think there’s a difference between having data publicly available and voluntarily sending it straight to a data broker. Either way I don’t think you should need much of a reason to tell Facebook to fuck off and I find it kind of strange that people seem so hesitant about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I simply want the Fediverse to be a proper alternative option for social media access, not just another secret nerd club. We have enough of those already. That requires not completely closing off access to the things the typical person will want to access. I want all social media to eventually be interoperable like email is, preferably on the ActivityPub standard and not whatever centralized bullshit BlueSky is trying to cook up. That is the only way we’re going to break the corporate stranglehold on social media.
Put simply, if you make people choose between our platform and the large corporate-backed platform with orders of magnitude more users, they will choose the corporate platform almost every time. And I think that’s a bad outcome for all involved.
If it was almost any other corporation I’d be willing to give them a chance. If Tumblr actually launches ActivityPub I doubt many people will complain. The fact that it’s Facebook though makes it pretty much a non-starter imo.
The only difference between Tumblr and Facebook is size. Facebook isn’t uniquely evil; it does exactly what any corporation would do at that scale. The systems that molded Facebook into what it is would also mold Tumblr or anything else into the same abomination.
I would respect principled opposition to megacorps even if I think it’s still misguided in this instance, because at least that’s overall based. But all of the discourse focuses on the specific wrongdoings of Facebook as if any other corporation wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing in their position. It feels very kneejerk.
I want to federate and use it to destroy their platform. The biggest problem with the periodic social media “migrations” that always fail is that it creates a fragmented diaspora. Take Twitter as an example. When the big migration off Twitter was supposed to happen, some went to the Fediverse, some went to Threads, some went to BlueSky.
You know what happened? After a few weeks, most of them went back to Twitter, because that was the only common place between them, where they knew they could all meet and communicate. If Twitter was forced to federate with all other platforms, it would have been snuffed out by now. But if that was even proposed, everybody would have a kneejerk reaction, because Twitter bad. Nobody is thinking of the big picture.
Saddens me to see instance admins reducing their users legitimate concerns as ‘reactionary’ as if we/they are dumb ignorant fucks with no concrete concerns.
This is the very start of Meta gaining a foot hold in the fediverse. Of course they’re not going to do anything overtly shitty at the very start. That’ll come later when they get a firm foothold, start suggesting ‘helpful’ tweaks to ActivityPub, get a seat at various tables etc. The privacy issue is not so much (to me) about what they can do now , because he’s right, anyone can set up scrapers and use the API, it’s about what they’ll introduce on Threads instances a few years from now, then offer to make part of the ActivityPub standard because its just so cool.
Of course there’ll be ads at some point on Threads instances and Meta are the absolute masters at online ads. They’re so good at it, not even UBO catches them all. If anyone honestly believes they’re not going to be capable of injecting ads at some point in the future, they’re living in a rose tinted fantasy land.
But those things are the future. Right now, Threads is already a place that is awash with hate groups like LibsOfTikTok etc. One of things I love about the fediverse is that I don’t have to wade through that type of shit. It’s mostly not here via defederation and if we know (as we do) that threads already has that type of content on it, why the fuck are people so keen to ‘wait and see’? We can already see.
And yes, I know - I can user block and instance block, but the times I have to do that right now with an active userbase of less than 2 million across the fediverse are few and far between. Ramp that active userbase up to 100 million and it’s going to feel like most of my time is spent playing whack-a-mole. That’s not an enjoyable user experience in any way. And even after I’ve done all that, the open warfare that’s going to break out with well-meaning non-Threads users reposting, quoting ‘look at this evil fuck’ type posts is going to mean I still end up seeing some christian fascists dumb take on COVID or whatever.
We, as a group of people, developed and use fediverse software precisely to escape this sort of shit. When are we going to learn that growth for the sake of growth is absolutely meaningless? Focus on quality and organic growth will occur. Let’s have enough faith in the software and users that corporate users want to come to us.
Excellent post. I’m convinced everyone arguing in favor of letting facebook or twitter into the fediverse, are just ignorant of the these company’s history, and what they’re capable of.
There is exactly zero reason to let a rabid wolf into your house, or say things like, “but what harm can this wolf do???”
Yeah, and some of us are software engineers and IT admins who understand the technical working of what’s happening and can make informed and reasoned posts (like the one linked), instead of making decisions based off of inaccurate metaphors.
This is the best do you know who I am foot-mouth I’ve seen in many a year 😂 https://github.com/dessalines
Them also being a software developer doesn’t change the fact that their reasoning is based on a metaphor and not a technical detail.
I created the software you’re using right now, and I’m fully aware of how fragile this entire experiment is. We’re going up against a system that can throw nearly unlimited resources in brainpower and money to subvert a system. It takes an astounding level of technocratic arrogance to think that you’re immune to EEE, and that you can outsmart that amount of power.
No, it just takes having worked at meta and seen what they actually do. Your fear is boosting them into Gods that they are not.
Keep simping, you might land a job there yet!
Reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit is it?
It’s shocking people are expressing this kind of naivety with the benefit of XMPP’s history.
HOW is this blog post still being posted??? It’s debunked literally every single time someone posts this trash.
Google Talk did not kill XMPP. Google Talk had millions of users who wanted to use Google Talk and when Google switched the protocol away from XMPP, it became suddenly apparent that XMPP didn’t actually have many users and that felt like XMPP dying, when in reality Google Talk bringing in their millions of users was the only thing that had kept XMPP alive that long.
Stating your opinion that you disagree is not the same as debunking. If this has been debunked so frequently, link to the debunking. Repeating a wrong opinion over and over doesn’t make it true.
Reality is not subjective. One of those things actually happened.
If you read both arguments and think that an obscure open source protocol had a chance in hell of taking on Google Talk when Google was in its heyday of public love, that’s fine, but that takes a lot more faith than believing that Google Char’s millions of users wanted to use Google chat, and weren’t using it because of the server communication protocol it implemented behind the scenes.
You seem to be too young to have been around at the time, or you didn’t pay attention back then.
Google was a small upstart at the time, riding to success on the back of open protocols like XMPP (outside of their core search engine business) that had all the support from tech enthusiasts back then*
Google’s XMPP server was simply the easiest one to switch to from ICQ/AIM/MSN which loads of people did back then.
Only when Google had pretty much absorbed all potential users did they decide to not really care about open protocols after all and stopped developing the s2s federation support.
*Edit: this conversation played out many times back then: “did you hear of this cool new messenger called Jabber?” - " No, but cool, where can I sign up for it? ICQ sucks” - “hmm, do you know Gmail?” - “yes, I just signed up there because the awesome free 1GB email space” - " ok, cool! Then you already have a Jabber account, let’s use that one :)”
You yourself said that the vast majority of users did not care about what protocol they used. They cared about using the chat app with the most user friendly interface, which was Google Talk.
XMPP is an implementation protocol, not a user facing feature.
And your point being exactly?
We are discussing if Google first benefitted from and then damaged the open XMPP federation, not some protocol implementation details.
That Google Talk would have taken all those users and become the dominant chat platform over XMPP based ones, regardless of whether or not they used XMPP to start with. Google Talk was always going to outcompete Jabber / AOL / MSN messenger because those platforms stopped investing in user facing features.
Google’s XMPP server was Jabber. That’s the main reason it got traction in the first place.
You are arguing retroactively. Back then was a vastly different situation, and you really seem to be too young to understand that. Large platforms like today simply did not exist yet.
Stop being a gatekeeping asshat, you have no idea how old I was, and it’s patronizing and dumb as shit to claim that someone is young just cause they experienced a time period differently from you. Your memory and perception is not an infallible perfect record of major corporate and consumer trends.
YES. Because we are not talking about what is going to happen with Lemmy. We’re talking about what DID happen with XMPP and Google Talk. We have the benefit of hindsight, and seeing that Jabber did not matter one iota compared to Gmail. If it did, you would be able to ask any person old enough to remember Jabber what they thought of it. You know what you’ll get? Blank stares.
Gmail and Google Talk had millions of users, XMPP only had millions of users when Google Talk decided to keep it alive by supporting it.