The Fediverse is currently divided over whether or not to block Threads. Here are some of the things people are worried about, some opportunities that might come from it, and what we need to do to prepare.
There’s no reason to not block threads. If someone wants to use it, they can go there and use it. There’s absolutely 0 need for the fediverse to have Meta anywhere near it.
Say Meta does get federated. How long until they begin making contributions to ActivityPub? Before Meta decides it’s a worthwhile purchase?
Oh yeah that’s my mistake, it was a plugin for WordPress, not ownership. It looks like it was co-authored by someone as part of W3C to be an internet standard, but I don’t know if that changes much.
It’s mostly that if something somewhere can be bought, Meta will try to. I don’t see any reason to extend any open arms. Just because something is open source doesn’t mean that ownership won’t change or changes can’t be implemented or influenced.
That aside though I also feel that any integration is just asking for an invitation to reckless abandon. I think I mentioned in the previous comment, what happens as Meta begins making contributions to the open source protocol? As people looking to run their own instances come across a Meta build due to SEO? Maybe Meta money starts getting thrown at W3C and the co-author - who knows man. At that point, are we just going to use whatever forks that get Meta’s stuff stripped out from it?
Why risk 100m Facebook and Instagram users for the “potential growth of Masto-lemmy” when it seems like the very obvious reality is that Threads would just leech users from here after some integration then “oops Threads doesn’t support ActivityPub instances all your communities are with us now sorry!”. Not to mention the imposed tracking, dark patterns and monetization - which from my understanding instances can set fetch authorization, alongside defederating it would mostly prevent the data scraping? However I’m not entirely clear on all that.
Anyway, not trying to claim that I’m extremely well versed in the subject or the specific logistics of how it works, I just don’t see a single reason to trust Meta or why there would be any reason to federate with them.
I also personally have no issue having separate spaces for separate things, so to me the integration just seems a bit much. Some people have told me that’s a positive for them, and that’s cool. If I could functionally have one and actually interact in full I’d probably just use one account too. I occasionally view microblogs on Kbin alongside my subscriptions, I browse through here (Beehaw), both slrpnks lemmy and Mastodon instances, all different accounts. If I were interested in the content I’d have made a threads account (but the posts I get shown from Instagram don’t really pull any interest).
If someone is interested in using Threads, why not just use it there? I don’t entirely understand the reason we would need Threads to be seen in the same space as Twitter posts and Reddit threads all alongside our microblogs and posts (if say, Reddit and Twitter were also to federate). It just seems so much more centralized compared to the nature of the decentralized instances, I could see Meta’s interest here being to make their version of WeChat. A space where you have Microblogs, Forums, Marketplace, and games all in one spot no need to ever use anything else.
I dunno, I just feel like the desire to consolidate everything into a single bitty package is asking for a disaster. And to an extent, I genuinely can see this being the start of that path.
Anyway, sorry to get so long winded. Maybe I can take advantage of this idea and develop an app to centralize your Fediverse, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, GameFAQs and any account you can think of all in one spot. Then you can just interact from all of them as a single master user posting from each individual account as you come across the content. Support for all that will probably get pricey so I’ll just charge for extended account integration, maybe I can make my own subscription based off this to cover the cost (/s but feel free to use it!)
I think I mentioned in the previous comment, what happens as Meta begins making contributions to the open source protocol?
Then you don't use their version.
As people looking to run their own instances come across a Meta build due to SEO? Maybe Meta money starts getting thrown at W3C and the co-author - who knows man. At that point, are we just going to use whatever forks that get Meta’s stuff stripped out from it?
Yes? We're already using not-their-version, without the 100M users. If it's okay now, it'll be okay when we decide they took it too far and can go fuck themselves.
Anyway, I don't have a horse in this race. I have a Mastodon and Kbin account, and I don't know if either of them plan on federating with Threads or not. It just seems like a lot of alarm over nothing. Saying that people aren't going to want to defederate from Threads once they're federated is the same argument people would use to say I wouldn't leave Twitter or Reddit, and I easily left both of those.
Right, we left there over much smaller reasons than Meta. If Meta is heavily involved in ActivityPub, where to next?
Yes? We’re already using not-their-version,
Right, but for how long would we be able to do this? If Threads does federate and get popular, even worse, the communities here get heavily integrated with Threads, wouldn’t it only be a matter of time until Meta makes a push to keep users on their platform over this one?
Then you don’t use their version.
We come full circle here, if you’re not using Meta’s federated ActivityPub, it’s a ghost town because the goal is for Threads to replace us. What are you doing here on Kbin when all of the communities it is part of is now over on Meta’s instance?
I don’t know if it’s as simple as “don’t use it”. This is Meta we are talking about. You literally can’t not use Facebook to get away from it’s tracking, they track you regardless.
I also don’t really have a horse in the race. I’m with you in that yeah, I’d probably find somewhere else too. But I’m thinking long term with our space here, regardless of whether 41% of instances are defederated, Meta’s involvement is a bad thing due to their immense wealth and, in my opinion, high likelihood they will implement changes that we can’t get away from. I’m not so sure it will be as simple as not using their version. I also don’t think it’s wrong for people to be aware and vocal about this, even if it may not immediately affect us in the moment. Again, we left Reddit over basically the complete inverse of this situation. Reddit closing 3rd party apps to get users into their app vs. Threads adoption of these 3rd party apps to get data from these users.
Why would we be okay making it so that developers and users have to work around finding Meta-stripped builds when we can just… Mitigate how much Meta is able to do it in the first place?
When I said I don't have a horse in this race, I meant I don't much care whether my instances federate with it or not. You're not the first doomsayer over Threads, but I have yet to see anything that would stop this decentralized thing from allowing us to just de-federate or otherwise ignore any changes Threads makes to ActivityPub after the fact. We literally CAN not use Facebook. You may as well say Microsoft is trying to extinguish Linux, but I don't think they could if they tried. Yes, I'm familiar with EEE, but the things these technologies are used for appear to make them inextinguishable.
That’s not what I was saying, or meant to say. I was saying they are tracking you regardless of whether you do or not. Why allow that to extend further by embracing them into the fediverse? I also don’t think they are inextinguishable, I think there a wide, wide range of ways to fracture then consolidate.
Alas, time will tell and we can only hope it amounts to nothing and all us worrywarts are proven wrong as Meta does nothing but integrate then occasionally serve ads (with of course, all the background tracking).
Out of curiosity and completely unrelated, do you have an Android phone? Not Google? If so, it may be worth checking your active processes running under dev services, there may be a Meta Services and Meta Services Manager running in the background. It’s worth disabling these from the apps list, they literally don’t do anything but serve up ads and track you.
On by default through many phones and carriers, gotta love it.
From my understanding between defederating and opting into fetch authorization this can be mitigated. Not prevented entirely, as you said they can just make accounts anywhere, but it prevents serving it up on a silver platter.
Besides that the data alone isn’t the point. It’s that combined on top of everything else.
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