If we want wider adoption and tout interoperability than we need to allow some other platforms to integrate in some ways. I do agree though it makes me a bit anxious, but I also think it would be silly for email clients to bar gmail accounts from interacting with them.
Why the hell would they bother trying? Meta has literal billions of users. They can, and if we let them, will swallow tge fediverse whole, and barely notice.
The whole fediverse has less than 1% of their users.
It’s a core selling point of activitypub/the fediverse. It’s the reason why we’re on Kbin and able to interact with people across countless other instances. It’s also how email - the #1 thing all of this is compared to - functions. If we aren’t going to seek sone level of interoperability with the “larger Internet“ then why are we doing all of this? There are far easier ways to run forums and interact with people. This is incredibly convoluted when you get down to it and it’s because we are trying to foster a decentralized, relatively diverse ecosystem.
Please do not patronize/dismiss me like that. Presumably we are both adults and can handle respectful disagreement.
Mosseri says that the Threads team wants to make it so the option to follow a Threads account on other platforms is available to “all public accounts on Threads, not just a handful of testers.”
You can only follow other threads accounts?
At the moment, he says the team plans to require accounts to be public and that users “explicitly opt in” to showing their posts on other federated servers. But the team is still considering making this the default, with the choice to opt out, instead.
They’re planning on using the fediverse content and server space without providing any.
The Threads team wants to let replies from other platforms show up inside of Threads. “It’s a bad experience now that I have to leave the Threads app to see replies I’m getting from the broader community,”
It’s the content they want the most, this makes it clear if you have to leave their app to reply to someone on another instance. We’re the zoo.
This is a key one: follower portability. “Eventually, it should also be possible to enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app / server,” Mosseri writes. “I believe that it’s important that creators own their relationship with their audience.”
The bolded words makes me think that they’re not going to do any of that, lol
This is a key one: follower portability. “Eventually, it should also be possible to enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app / server,” Mosseri writes. “I believe that it’s important that creators own their relationship with their audience.”
idk, the primary motivator is probably PR, but there is a chance that there’s still a trace, a glimmer of empathy and excitement for innovation, hidden way down somewhere in that human.
They could go a bluesky route and build their own protocol so they could have more control over it. I don’t think non-techy people would care about federation to be honest.
Fair point, but they also have to please the EU, which won’t buy them creating a new protocol with two existing ones gaining major traction, of which one is w3c standard.
Great, so he is already talking about how to extend activityPub? He says that like this function will be a one way street. This is literally what many here are talking about.
He’s literally talking about the ability to migrate accounts, or the very least export your data. Which is a feature on many platforms of Fediverse. There’s no “extend” whatsoever
If I understand correctly he’s talking about the ability to export your account data and then import it to another compatible fedi server. Other software (mastodon, latest version of lemmy, etc) also do it on a client side, so I don’t think any changes to AP will be necessary.
What is concerning is his wording about “to leave threads”. Consider that whatever saying in this interview is carefully laid out beforehand. What reason is there for a corporation that is living of it’s users to just so casually let them leave like they please with everything that is giving value to Meta? He is not talking about wanting the users to leave threads, but to be able to migrate either direction. Who is going to win that fight in the end? The corporation who’s solely goal is to win or the free and open community that is so tolerant that it invites the beast it fled from?
Yep, that’s really concerning. Is it possible for export account function to inject some kind of ID to continue spying on a user even after they’ve leaved Threads (even on a non-federated instance)?
They benefit by being able to say to regulators, especially in the EU, that they aren’t a monopoly that locks people into their ecosystem. They avoid expensive legal battles, fines, and possibly being forced to open their other, more lucrative silos. These are lesser benefits, but they also get cred for doing something cool, get to position themselves as a better alternative to Twitter, and might get to say that they beat Bluesky to full federation.
That’s reasonable although I believe it’s just not how they do things. This feature lets their users to move to ad-free mastodon instances including those that signed fedi-pact. And it will be available in a few clicks in their app (I suppose it will).
Their last EU fine was $1.3 billion. That’s change-how-you-do-things money. The EU is getting more serious about tech regulation. It also made Apple add RCS support, which they swore they’d never do.
This feature lets their users to move to ad-free mastodon instances including those that signed fedi-pact.
I don’t think that’s possible. You have to be federated. Suspended servers can’t connect at all so there’s no way to transfer followers or set a redirect. It’s not something you can just choose to not respect - suspension is something done to untrustworthy servers so requiring them to honor it would completely break it immediately. If they signed the fedi pact and didn’t act, that’s not really on Meta.
I don’t think that’s possible. You have to be federated.
Still possible with intermediary but yeah, that’s much less convenient. Well, I hope that’s true. Unfortunately, even if they really have done this because of EU they still may try to monetize non-Threads users.
If they use a Mastodon intermediary, there’s a 30-day cool down. If they use their own, they’d have to expose the IP to do it so it would be discovered. I don’t see how it would benefit them to do that. If they did, that’s some sketchy, bad faith shit and they’d be universally fediblocked pretty quick.
I also don’t think they can monetize non-threads users because they can’t send them ads. It would be difficult to connect you to a Meta account to serve ads to because they only have your user name, profile pic, server IP, and server domain name. In most cases it’d be impossible. You’re pretty well protected because Mastodon servers treat all remote servers as untrustworthy and don’t give them any info.
It would be difficult to connect you to a Meta account to serve ads to because they only have your user name, profile pic, server IP, and server domain name. In most cases it’d be impossible. You’re pretty well protected because Mastodon servers treat all remote servers as untrustworthy and don’t give them any info.
Facebook already creates “shadow profiles” for people not on Facebook and stores data about them. This means Meta won’t directly monetize the fediverse, but use the data available for their ad business anyway. (Maybe even connect other accounts through posts, but I don’t know how well this works with the info and amount of a users posts.)
Nothing stopping them from doing it now, anyone posting to the fediverse has to accept that their posts can and probably will be used to train someone elses LLM. It’s public afterall.
Ideally people would all form cooperatives and host their own instances on social media and their would be no corporate interests on the fediverse. The fediverse has a chance to to gain access to more content by federating with threads. But I don’t know if the costs or worth it. But if we don’t take the chance we may never have the mind share to become mainstream
Well they can plan it if they want to, but I'm sure many instances will just end up blocking them and there isn't anything they can do about it. But on the other hand, having such a large backing is making things much easier for Threads.
I’m surprised it’s taking them so long. It seems like it shouldn’t be that much of a technical challenge for an organization with Meta’s resources, especially when it was planned before the service even launched.
If you follow someone on threads, they’ll only get your username, server name, profile pic, and server IP. That’s the same thing any remote instance gets. They’ll know if you like/share/comment on their content because you’d be telling them. Besides that, they can’t know anything. They only interact directly with your server, so they won’t even be able to tell if you see or click anything you’re subscribed to. In order to track you, they’d have to get info from your server (that isn’t collecting it to begin with). They also don’t have a reliable way to connect the sliver of data collected to an identity to serve ads to.
Really, the only reason they can collect as much about their users as they do is that they control their servers.
People have this misunderstanding, if they add ads, it will be for users of #threads, other servers will not see the ad. What about if they inject an ad to every post? That would make no sense, their income come from ads, but personalized ads, you probably hate them, but tons of people find them useful, besides they won't be able to have metrics for a wall of text or image at the bottom of every post for others in the #fediverse.
From my post below: “If you follow someone on threads, they’ll only get your username, server name, profile pic, and server IP. That’s the same thing any remote instance gets. They’ll know if you like/share/comment on their content because you’d be telling them. Besides that, they can’t know anything. They only interact directly with your server, so they won’t even be able to tell if you see or click anything you’re subscribed to. In order to track you, they’d have to get info from your server (that isn’t collecting it to begin with). They also don’t have a reliable way to connect the sliver of data collected to an identity to serve ads to.
Really, the only reason they can collect as much about their users as they do is that they control their servers.”
Could be just tactics. Remember the uproar the first time it was said threads would federate? Suddenly they were “not ready yet”.
Now in the second go, the idea got already normalized and there are more pro-meta comments. And they will stay silent and non-intrusive at the beginning.
Zuck is really big into early adaptation (metaverse i.e.), they see potential in the fediverse and their first objective is to be part of it, then grow with it and finally take advantage of it, once the time is right.
It’s really not a good thing that some people think the fediverse is going to go up in flames as soon as meta joins. That’s obviously not going to happen and sets wrong expectations that could lead to more acceptance.
I do imagine they have a dirty trick in mind and I’m not sure what it is yet. Perhaps they aren’t either.
There’s also an opportunity though. Threads users will get exposed to open source, independently-hosted alternatives they wouldn’t have heard about otherwise. Some of them will switch. If those projects can offer a better user experience than Threads, more of them will switch.
I suspect the angle is something around avoiding regulation, they were happy with the previous “we’re just a platform” arrangement where they could hold their hands up and waive responsibility for the content and users on it. Now that’s actively being remediated by various governments, I think they’re hoping they can make claims of reduced responsibility for what’s on their site if it can come from elsewhere in the fediverse.
I’m not sure about specifics, but my gut feeling is that this is the angle
I think if that’s all there is to it, I’d be pretty happy with it. Governments can still attempt to regulate their use of algorithmic feeds regardless of the source of content.
I’ve not seen any pro meta posts. Unless this is meant in the same vein as those calling out Israel are portrayed as pro hamas wrongly. What I have seen is a lot of baseless speculation, and uninformed opinion being thrown around as fact.
We should definitely keep an eye on every capitalist or authoritarian. Because they’d gladly sacrifice our lives and privacy for a few dollars more. But anyone who thinks integrating their own servers is going to give them any more information than the servers already give anyone who asks. Has a flawed understanding of what is possible and likely.
This is all akin to the people who never used XMPP claiming Google killed it. Which is another bit of fear uncertainty and doubt being thrown out to stir people up in these threads as well. I have used XMPP consistently for the last 20+ years. I’m logged in this very minute. They just had a 2023 Google summer of code conclude.
We should watch meta like a hawk. And of course not give them special treatment. But they want to connect to us. We have the keys and the power if they don’t want to play by the rules. We don’t have to federate with them. They’re going to collect the data regardless. But the enemy of our enemy can still be useful.
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