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 āsoonā.
But on July 14, @alexeheath of the Verge reported that Metaās saying ActivityPub integrationās āa long way outā. Hey wait a second. Make up your mind already!
From the perspective of the āfree fediverseā thatās not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is āa long way outā is encouraging. OK, itās not as good as āwhen hell freezes over,ā but itās a heckuva lot better than āsoon.ā In fact, Iād go so far as to say āa long way outā is a clear victory for the free fediverseās cause.
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Itās 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. š¤
āalmostā
Threads is pretty blatant about censorship and sharing of user data. They use terms like āa friendly spaceā and āconvenientā to sell it to users. So youāre 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 donāt want my US government telling me what I can and can not discuss in a public venue.
In the USA thereās a little thing called the first amendment. Granted these are companies and donāt necessarily have to adhere to civil rights in the same way government agencies do, but in effect theyāre doing the same thing. The US government should absolutely not be coercing these US companies into censoring content, which they are.
š āSaying slurs on a private forum is mah god-given right!ā
Thereās plenty to criticize about Twitter and Threads, but the unmoderated parts of the internet are cancer.
Also pretending that Elon doesnāt remove things he doesnāt 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 thereās garbage you donāt want to see in a community. But the difference is thereās an actual human being I entrust to the task of removing it (the moderator). If donāt 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 itās 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 ācensorshipā of online spaces, theyāre mad about far-right hate-speech or dangerous misinformation.
Well Iām not wikipedia here, just going on things Iāve 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.
Iāve 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. Theyāre certainly not going to advertise thatās the case. I donāt doubt this is happening for a second and in their own best interest they keep it on the downlow.
Iām not sure I understand the comment. You meant 99% of those complaining are posting hostile shit? If so, itās the 1% that post intelligent and legitimate counter arguments we need to allow a voice. Itās 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 weāre just throwing our freedom away.
So, nothing that any of us can research for ourselves? Odd. Well known facts shouldnāt be hard to citeā¦
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.
Please please please provide evidence of this one.
No? Youāre 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?
Unless those moderators are getting paid, you are just benefitting from unpaid labor and externalizing the costs of running the community onto volunteers.
Thatās why Iām 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 youāre posting paints musk in a positive light, doesnāt upset him, and so long as itās 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 theyāre receiving headwinds on two fronts there. Thereās no need for them to implement federation if they canāt overcome the other regulatory hurdles first.
Yep. Federation could conceivably respond to the EUās requirement for interoperability ā 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 didnāt 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 ā itās just a cost of doing business) and promise to remove the barriers (which they wouldnāt, and then there would be another multi-year legal battle).
But none of that works if the EU wonāt allow Threads for some other reason!
Still, my guess is that theyāll figure out a way around the EUās objections to Threads ā¦ we shall see ā¦
Imagine of the EU mandated all social networks to be interoperableā¦
Like āstandard phone calls have always been interoperableā ?
Like ābatteries should be replaceableā ?
Or ādocuments file formats should be openā ?
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
I think itās more likely that theyāll hope demand is high enough that the EU is forced to let them in.
I think weāre in violent agreement here: getting the EU to drop their objections is certainly one way around them! So yeah, theyāll probably try to use the demand for Threads to push back on the DMAās anti-trust-ish provisions (which as I understand is the current blockage). And then theyāll try to use their ActivityPub integration to push back on the interoperability requirements, no doubt characterizing them as unrealistic. Itās predictable but still irritating.
yeah, theyāll 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.
I think they may have realised that federating whilst theyāre still not allowed to operate in the EU would hand hundreds of millions of EU users to independent instances.
Nah, what would be the point of keeping Threads around then? Theyād shut it down as soon as user numbers got too low. Same as what happened with G+
Agree, if Threads majorly flops theyād just pull the plug, add theyāve done before.
I still donāt get their target audience for Threads.
Facebook users donāt 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 theyāre not allowed to link in directly from Instagram, and š users ā¦ well ā¦ they will continue using š.Ironically the only ones wo really care about Threads is people in the Fediverse.
Iāll stop fighting when Meta no longer exists.
Iāll 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 āgovernmentā since it describes and means effectively NOTHING
Tribalism is a form of government hate to break it to youā¦
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 itās possible to move towards a different and better form.
So you want to reduce humanity by 99%? Because hunter gatherer lifestyle isnāt 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 āhave always existedā because of course they havenāt, thatās patently absurd since they are social constructs
Youāre right, I didnāt look at the usernames and thought you were op, arguing that we donāt 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 didnāt have a form of government and weāll be impressed.
I see, if you define government as āany collection of humans,ā than yes, itās 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 donāt care. Iād rather you left that shit attitude at reddit, though.
Ah, thatās just the point - the types of people have been around for awhile, but the institutions supporting them ā backing militias, basically ā have not.
I canāt continue with this conversation simply because of how ignorant you are. Iām not here to argue with you over the dumb things you feel are gotcha points. You are not as clever as you think you are.
Youāre out of line. If anyone has the reddit attitude of casting aspersions rather than rebut effectively, it is you.
Thatās called a state, governments are the stateās employees
When a company says āa long way outā it often ends up meaning āneverā. Fingers crossed.
Called it. Iād be prepared to bet that in a few more weeks, Metaās just gonna quietly drop the idea of ActivityPub integration all together. To me at least, it always seemed like the whole āplanned Fediverse integrationā 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 theyād have been talking about āMetaverse integrationā instead.
Every āmainstreamā (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.
I donāt trust them. So this means nothing.
I donāt trust them either, and theyāre very likely to move ahead with federation anyhow. It still means something that theyāre changing the story that theyāre telling.
Honestly this is why the whole āMeta will kill the fediverseā thing people were saying never really convinced me. They just donāt seem to care, I mean itās been a month and they still have no real plans to actually federate.
A month isnāt very long, they havenāt even figured out their basic features - this was more a āmaybe later this yearā 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 theyāve put the idea on the back burner after we largely made our position clear, but itās not unlikely that they try to quietly federate down the roadā¦ Every time they think about it, we have to make them believe this would be more trouble than itās 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 isnāt available in the EU and they are actively preventing usage in the EU). Another option is that theyāre still out to kill the fediverse. That one honestly seems more likely to me, given how theyāve 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, itās speculation, but itās educated speculation. Iām intimately familiar with activity pub and the way large projects are brought into existence
Plus, following my recommendation if Iām wrong would at most be a slight amount of wasted effort, but ignoring it if Iām right could be a huge problem.
Iād 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 itās 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 arenāt 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 couldnāt 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 serviceās 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
Defederating isnāt the threat - the situation you describe would hurt the fediverse, but it would survive as you said.
Youāre missing the far more insidious piece - changing the standards
So letās 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 āpath isnāt good enough for what we want, weāre changing the first number, always 0, and weāre going to set it to a number from 1 to 100000 that will encode topic, work appropriateness, and sentiment analysis into this valueā.
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 āmastodon sucked for a few daysā
Now letās say they use this sentiment analysis more deeply for the algorithm. Theyāve got AI doing it, hell, theyāre even being āgood fediverse citizensā 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, letās say Facebook decides āmastodon is costing us server time, and we donāt make much off them. Letās just show more threads content and only show replies and the top thousand mastodon posts each hourā Suddenly, mastodon users get much less engagement when they post.
Their takeaway is āmastodon isnāt as good for us as it used to beā
Maybe someone builds an open source system for mastodon to do classification. Itās much more expensive server-wise, so maybe only the top servers do itā¦ 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, letās say someone at Facebook goes ātheir classification isnāt as good as ours, and their nsfw tagging isnāt as good. Our advertisers would be pissed if they found out, letās not sell ads on any post not classified by us just to be safeā. Someone else comes along and says āweāre leaving money on the table here, letās show less of those postsā.
And kind of like this, these little decisions made with little malice would slowly choke out mastodon. With a dominant player, the little guys donāt 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 donāt 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 thisā¦ But it doesnāt take much. They just have to occasionally make the fediverse feel buggy or unfinished in comparison, and itāll forever become a place for enthusiasts and never as a serious option by the public at large
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 itās not a matter of EEE or whatever, itās 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, itās more likely that we would gain users, who would peek through the Meta windows and notice that we are having a better experience.
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.
Itās ironic, considering how much weāve been fighting over whether to let Meta in or not.
Fuck me, thatās exactly how society works, some bully doing something, the normal people fighting over it, then the bully going ānever mind lolā.
Thatās true, although Iāve been saying all along that Threadsā potential arrival is a great opportunity whether or not it happens.
If I donāt want something to happen, Iād much rather a corporation say āa long way outā than ānever going to happenā. 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.
Euuuuhā¦ Is it me or is some parts of the article setting up/opposing LGBTQ+ against non-lgbtq?
āOne 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.ā This sentence may be technicaly right, but itās
sooooo stupidmostly interpretation. Edit: wrong and uncalled forStarting from there, the article seems to be as much about āus va themā than threads and metaā¦
Why is it stupid? The article isnāt setting up the tension, itās describing the tension that exists.
Unless Iām mistaken, if you remove the LGBTQ community everybody that leftā¦ Is cis persons. As in general ātechyā world, most of the person using fediverse (and itās 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, Iām probably over analysing, as usual.
Yes, I certainly constructed the sentence to highlight the different reactions. Later in the article I say āAnd by prioritizing their desire to be embraced by Meta over queer and trans peopleās safety, Metaās cis advocates undercut their claims to be allies in ways that may be hard to recover fromā ā which is true no matter what Meta does or doesnāt wind up doing with Threads. Of course itās not the only thing going on, but I think itās important enough that itās worth highlighting.
Oh boy act surprised
I know thereās someone picking up a phone because they called it.
Good, fuckem
Without activepub integration, I just see threads as another Twitter. I donāt think any of these walled gardens are very interesting, especially Twitter copies such as Mastodon or Threads. Itās just another platform for the few to get their message out to the many. Itās boring in almost all cases.
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? Iām not subscribing to Apple TV just for that but I read the first book many years ago and Iām interested on Fundation.
Thatās the neat thing, you donāt actually have to subscribe to any of these streaming services in order to watch their shows.
High seas time
yar har
They did something similar a few years ago.
At one point they opened their messenger system and allowed XMPP clients to connect. This worked absolutely fine, and chatting in any XMPP compatible client was possible.
But it was also possible to OTR encrypt the data so Facebook only got seemingly random character strings that are absolutely useless for data harvesting and profile analysis to sell to advertisers, so they closed down the messenger and disabled the XMPP bridge not long after they opened it.
Same will happen here: As soon as people start interacting in a way it is not possible for the company to track everything, they will stop allowing it.
On a personal note: I will defederate from Meta as soon as they establish their ActivityPub bridge (it of course will only be a bridge, or does anyone really think they would base one of their main features on an open standard?)