Because Threads didn’t federate. It turns out when they said that they’ll federate, they actually meant “some time in the undisclosed future.” And then Threads lost a lot of that initial marketing hype so everyone forgot about it.
Apparently Meta is currently testing federation for Threads, though? The problem about Threads federating isn’t resolved, to be entirely clear. It was merely that everyone, Meta included, just decided to kick the can down the road and think about the issue later.
Who knew a company with an unhealthy obsession with harvesting every screen tap of data from every person using their services… would chicken out from connecting their servers to a bunch of clients they couldn’t monitor.
… That said, I actually didn’t see this coming. It baffles me that I didn’t, but I didn’t.
They’ve honestly done exactly what they’d said they would so far. They always said it would federate eventually, but not at first. They were even clear about it with their early adopters/influencers. They later clarified that it would be in 2024 and they’ve just started a small trial of limited federation a few weeks early.
Mike Masnick has covered it a lot. He’s consistently reported that they are surprisingly determined to federate. I don’t think there’s a downside for them. They aren’t connecting either of their cash cows and Threads isn’t a huge moneymaker for them. It seems more an opportunity to head off the EU regulators (and poke Twitter in the eye).
They didn't "chicken out", necessarily. It turns out that making huge social networks, and particularly for-profit ones, is not trivial. They connected a few accounts this week... but they also launched in the European Union this week, they weren't even out worldwide until now.
But hey, don't you worry, everybody is freaking out again. And if BlueSky ever finishes their own proprietary interoperability protocol and that is made AP-compatible on this end I'm sure we'll have another hipster breakdown.
As far as I know there is no intention to have Bluesky be proprietary in any way in the long run, just the philosophy is different and closer to P2P networks. For example migration is a big element of the design, unlike Mastodon. But at the moment it’s still being built, hence why it looks much more proprietary for now.
It gives them the ability to compile data on people of the fediverse, though. They might not get the same depth of information as if we used their websites directly, or nearly as much as from their apps, but they still get usernames and comments and whatever other data they can deduce from that from any instance they’re federated with. Of course, if they were really interested they could just scrape it.
Also Threads is just incredibly corporate. There’s zero discoverability which means it’s all just celebrities and major news organisations, which isn’t a fun place to be for most people.
I’m curious about the resources required to federate with threads. It would utterly dwarf every other instance in every capacity, 1000fold. Wouldn’t this put a fair bit of financial pressure on every federated instance?
Yes, absolutely. As an instance owner of four services (lemmy, mastodon, matrix and peertube), the users will absolutely follow a lot more folks (and maybe unfollow them but then the damage is done, metaphorically).
The larger problem will be the habit of having infinitely more people and then meta defederating/limiting the non-meta instances which is what makes them the most money.
The resources required by federating depend on how many people follow each other across those two instances and how much these post. Just existing and theoretically federating doesn’t need any resources if there’s nobody following, assuming threads isn’t doing that different from everyone else.
For each post a user makes on your instance, it sends that post to each instance where someone follows the poster. There’s no automatic sending to every known instance of every post on your instance.
The issue was about threads implementing federation to connect to mastodon, lemmy and other networks that use that system. They did not implement it then, but said they would do it in the future. The topic has come up again because they announced they’re doing it now.
Threads still hasn’t actually fully connected with the fediverse, they are working on that, and until yesterday they weren’t live in Europe yet, so it wasn’t a real alternative for many people. That is changing drastically.
This post sounds to me exactly like people’s reactions to Brexit. They were like “see, it’s not to bad” for the whole time when nothing was implemented yet. And then it actually went live, and everything went to shit. Keep an eye on when things actually go live the way they plan.
Seems easy enough to answer: why has covid not wiped us out and is it not a problem?
The answer is it could have wiped us out and might still if we throw away all our carefulness.
Threads has at least 10x the users of the whole fediverse and they will have a huge majority, governed by meta a non democratic entity, taking part in a democratic system. Only a fool wouldn’t see this become a problem.
And it already has been in the past. It even has a name: EEE embrace, expand, extinguish. Its what google did with xmpp.
So yes, the problem is still there although it never goes as fast as it seems at first.
indeed. thats why its actually pretty good we’re going through this now since we have the opportunity to take this sh*t seriously and try to stop that practise
Don’t think it was federated at first if that’s what you’re asking.
It you’re asking why users didn’t migrate, probably because we like a forum experience rather than microblog following. I tried out bsky and it was a lot of pups. Like a lot. Like a pup fucking a pumpkin came up front page. I wouldn’t usually care, but it wasn’t marked suggestive.
Anyway, probably because there’s no pups on threads.
I found there was too much cat stuff on threadiverse at first. I enjoy a cat in a box or a cat on a keyboard or "this is my life now" or even wearing a kitten as a hat here or there but the whole things was cats cats cats with arch linux memes mixed in.
Threads was a relatively bare-bones app when it launched. It didn’t have many of the features that users had come to expect from other social media apps, such as the ability to post photos or videos, or to add filters or stickers.
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