I’m still on the fence about that being a good thing. I’m kind of looking forward to being able to see Twitter style content from major companies but without ads via my Mastodon account.
companies want to reach users, so they join Threads.
meta wants to federate Threads because it allows them to claim that they are not a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s new social media law and therefore not have legal responsibility for the content hosted by it.
a side effect of this is that I can view content posted by companies on Threads via a federated instance.
This is not necessarily the corp’s intention or them being generous. it is just a direct result of Meta using the fediverse as a loophole to get around an EU law and how ActivityPup functions.
I don’t actually think that this is an example of EEE because the Fediverse is not more popular than typical social media experiences, nor does it desire to become more popular or take over things like Facebook or Twitter. It simply wants to be a smaller alternative. I really think if it weren’t for the EU, meta would not be federating Threads.
EEE wouldn't work on something that is popular. The whole point is to destroy it before it becomes popular. Furthermore, corporations aren't okay with smaller alternatives existing at all. Their goal is to have a monopoly. Finally, Mastodon's growth has been really impressive for the last couple years, so I'm certain that other social media companies are looking for ways to shut them down.
The "gatekeeper" theory has some merit too, but not in that way. You can find the definition of a "gatekeeper" on the European Commission's website and I don't see how federation would affect it at all. That said, gatekeepers are required to "allow end users to install third party apps or app stores that use or interoperate with the operating system of the gatekeeper", and federation would meet that criteria.
Still, we already saw Twitter and Reddit move to paid APIs, and apparently that doesn't violate the DMA, so it's hard to believe that Meta would use a more open protocol without some other motivation.
Finally, Mastodon's growth has been really impressive for the last couple years, so I'm certain that other social media companies are looking for ways to shut them down.
Even with its impressive growth Mastodon is a drop in the bucket and I highly doubt any of the major players view it as a significant threat or competitor.
Unfortunately that’s not how it usually works with major companies, and I learned it thanks to some post on Lemmy.
Look for “EEE”, or “embrace extend extinguish”
Alternatively you can read the following comment in this very post: lemm.ee/comment/776049
I wouldn't mind having the ability to send angry messages to them again, especially if me not following them also means I don't ever see their content in my feed.
Right after I logged into Threads, with a new account, by first 2 pages were posts from Zuck, Wendy’s, Netflix, a Facebook fanboy, and another Wendy’s ad. I tried to screen shot it, but the shit app realized I was idle, and used that as an opportunity to refresh the content.
30 million people jumped into this stupid thing this AM.
Doesn’t work for me (lemmy.mindoki.com) okay I maybe have only one or two users but still 😅. BTW I had to tilt the phone to get put of the too small “reactive” page so that the search bar showed up.
That’s not how you’re supposed to think about it. I’m paraphrasing, but ✅️ means “safe” and ❌️ is the shape of your asshole when a known evil corpo entity comes to fuck you.
Interesting that most of the top Mastodon instances are fed rested whereas most other software, they are defederated. I wonder if it is due to how they work. Madrid in can have discussion but it’s less focused on that. Lenny has more voting and so more likely to have a consensus that shows all views agreement not just the volume. So, Madrid in would be more susceptible to bad actors simplifying their view, yet the same is possible on all.
I think it’s just the fact that they’ve additionally signed this “pact” that says they’ll never federate with them or anything else meta again. See the link at the bottom of the page.
Fedipact is an anti meta pact that some instances have taken.
Blocked is instances that have blocked meta but aren’t part of that pact. Blahaj zone is one of the latter for example. We block threads because it houses hate groups. Were it to stop doing that, we wouldn’t block them, but fedipact members still would, because their concerns are to do with what Meta itself represents
If the Fediverse is truly the architecture of the future, then shouldn’t it be able to stand any attempt by Meta to control it? If Meta is able to control it, then isn’t it the wrong solution?
IMO the way to prevent such a scenario from happening is not by blocking Meta, but by inviting equally large competitors to join the fediverse. The described tactic can only work if you have close to a monopoly.
Defederation is silly here in my opinion. I’d personally prefer more content and more mainstream stuff. We’re basically isolating ourselves. If it’s so great, it’ll flourish; instead we won’t allow it. So much for an open community. :shrug:
We also collectively downvote people who think this which is also silly. Heck even this post is more/less to bully these instances into doing what this group wants.
This feels like a basic misunderstanding of how the fediverse works. There are instances that embody your preferences and you can sign up for them.
One of the most important reasons I believe it is so useful to have a federverse that allows defederating is because ever since 2014 and 2015, and growing since then, there’s been a phenomenon of rabid online trolling and hyperpoliticization that’s had tendency to take over and destroy whatever pre-existing culture and norms existed, and the people doing it have leveraged bad faith free speech arguments to attempt to expose more platforms to their behavior, often making the same copy paste echo chamber argument that you are right now. I found the people making this argument to be operating from really shallow understandings of what intellectual diversity really means, because these people tend to ignore important components such as the paradox of tolerance, they tend not to believe that trolling or harassment campaigns are real, they tend not to be able to distinguish between “echo chamber” and the high level of discussion that’s possible when you found a community based on a common interest or shared set on principles, tend not to understand that you’re actually reducing the diversity of ideas by destroying each communities and turning all communities into the same thing, and tend to think of the full range of human ideas is represented in the unfortunately narrow framing of left-right spectrum which is most pertinent in American politics.
And for the fediverse, it calls the bluff perfectly, because for people who are concerned about echo chambers or “exposure to ideas” (yeah, which ones??), such people are able to join an instance that gives them the thing they say they want. But what they really tend to want is unmoderated unfiltered exposure to a captive audience, and the tangled contradictory mishmash of arguments about free speech and being open to ideas are just a means to that end. And so, they tend to be completely empty-handed when you ask them to explain why they feel specific instances need to federate or de-federate, you just get vague nothingburger speeches.
To be clear I don’t think that everyone making the argument thinks that way, I think some people are unwittingly doing the work of bad actors without meaning to. It’s just that I’ve seen this argument made over and over, and I feel like there’s some sort of boot camp we should all put ourselves through that involves understanding the history and some core ideas, because it could save everyone a lot of time.
No, projects like the Fediverse require initial protectionism. If you let megacorporations into your project, they will dominate and gain control over how the protocol develops in the future. Google Chrome’s huge share of users has enabled it to get dangerously close to locking other browsers out of most of the Internet (the Web Integrity API shenanigans are just the start). Chrome also removed support for JPEG XL, killing that attempt at a standard and enshrining its own WebP. It’s called “Embrace, extend, and extinguish”.
If the Fediverse actually wants to grow, it must unite against this. Otherwise we will end up with a couple hundred thousand Fedipact hardliners and millions on Facebook 2. No progress will have been made.
Good. On one hand it’s good to see fediverse stuff coming mainstream, on the other hand the last thing we want is a load of celebrities and brands trying to cannibalise said fediverse as an opportunity to corner the market instead of genuinely useful resources for communication
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