What if Meta’s hidden objective behind the Threads-to-Mastodon initiative is a play on app.net? And, what if threads.net is a measured step towards what could be the greatest pivot in all of tech?
Lots of options here TBH and I haven’t put much thought into it. Providing a service by running and managing software updates, migrations etc…, is one. MongoDB Atlas and Confluent Cloud are good examples of what I had in mind.
Edit: i dont know how many people feel this way, I beleave this and heard (verry biased, right to repair) people say this before.
Probably confusion but also abuse of the buisness model. “As a service” implies the recurrant payment is due to the service costing them resources to keep running. People like Adobe are just rent seeking. Also, the idea of ownership vs renting gets blurry.
Your examples, altho I havent thuroughly looked through them all look to be doing “as a service” correctly
This has a lot of nonsense. It gives too much credit while vague regarding LLaMA2. It failed to mention a lot of Open Source work Meta has done lately. It was only from a US point of view and not how the EU has been a thorn in Big Tech’s side. Mastodon has 1.6 MAU and many users have multiple accounts. Mastodon is too small for Meta to care about. Those startups Meta squashed were doing innovative things Meta never seen applied before. When it purchased Instagram and WhatsApp there were many millions of active users. Meta as was many Big Tech companies a part of the W3C when AP was being planned and backed out. The Fediverse is about as old as Facebook so Meta has seen this before, Mastodon hasn’t done anything new on this front. Outside of that there are some interesting considerations
Not only all the things you mention, but I kept thinking "Well, if they do manage to make a pivot where they are nothing but infrastructure and still manage to please Wall Street, then good for everyone:
Users will have a way to move out if they want to do so.
Companies that want to keep a social media presence will be able to do it from their own domains, while not having to worry about the operational aspects.
Decentralization is still preserved.
Transparency is still preserved.
By becoming infrastructure, it basically means they will become a commodity which will have to compete on price. Sure, one could make the case that AWS (and Azure/GCP) make real money by providing other services on top of their “basic” hosting offers, but no one looks AWS and think “AWS is locking people and charging crazy prices on S3 but they can’t get a compelling alternative”.
If anything, all these “what if scenarios” are almost making me wish that Zuck does pull it off.
Tldr: The answer is actually to outcompete them. People will use the app/website that brings them more value.
They already have the ability to subscribe to a thread and get notifications for new posts, quote posts, and an optional algorithm that recommends you stuff based on your likes. Things mastodon does not have will be coming fast to Threads. When they decide to come for Lemmy they will have features they see people begging too.
If its way easier and more useful to find information on Threads and their version of Lemmy people will start using it more and more. If AskDocs, AskHistorians, LegalAdvice and other useful subs popped up on a Meta version of Lemmy I would use a Lemmy instance that federated with it because its valuable information I want access to.
Just like twitter and instagram are basically required right now for 3D artists to find jobs, we will be required to use Facebook’s version of twitter, reddit, and instagram if they get the huge user base that twitter and reddit are pushing away, tiktok might lose from a ban, and they already have from instagram.
I hate facebook/meta but if its the best place to find information and work i will use it just like i currently begrudgingly use instagram for finding work.
We need to realize that evangelizing like Stallman is NOT how we grow the open web and FOSS. it’s by making killer apps/hardware like the Steam Deck did so well. People don’t use tech for the philosophy behind it, they use it as a tool to complete their task or improve their day. At the end of the day the best tool wins, not the most ethically made tool.
Currently the best thing we could do is get Lemmy to work better with mastodon and vice versa. Thats done by allowing Lemmy accounts to follow Lemmy and Mastodon accounts and by improving the UX for a Lemmy post to be made with mastodon so people post to a community like they would use a hashtag
I don’t think we can outcompete them, not when they will probably be pouring money to take over somehow. Before anything else we need to make sure we won’t get swallowed.
The Steam Deck is great but it was made by a huge corp with huge money, not volunteers.
Either start pitching realistic changes that can help protect the protocol or kindly stop posting this stuff. Everyone now has a pages long article all saying the same thing, and no one actually suggesting changes that could help.
At this point more people have spent time trying to figure out for Meta how they could EEE the fediverse then people have spent trying to make Libre fediverse better.
I mean y’all if want to spend your time thinking of cool and exciting ways meta can better extinguish the fediverse post it to LinkedIn and try to get on their payroll at least.
That’s my main point exactly. We all know it’s a threat, it’s been talked about to the point of annoyance here. We all have heard EEE here now. Anyone have ideas on how to prevent that from happening though?
Personally, I see decentralized IDs being a big one, one accepted account that can let someone log into multiple servers as the same person. That’ll lower the difficulty on choosing a server.
The other one, and this one I think may be controversial, but more and better feed algorithms. People want content that is relevant to them to be served to them automatically. Now we’re FOSS, and not ran for profit, so we can do even better a give people control over their algos, but I think most people would rather just click a couple interests and just get going and not have to figure out federated search and subscriptions before they do (not as a replacement but in addition too). The added benefit is we could potentially build a database of what a server’s network has access too and further help people figure out what server they want to join, so you get a little less dead Fediverse syndrome when you join a server that happens to block communities you would have been interested in. It of course could also be used to better refining searches in the first place.
Less feudal systems and more democracy for server admin, and community moderation I think will also help. Currently, admins and mods I think fall into lazie fair and organizers of the great purgers, it’s almost always been this way to me too. I think this will help make more server more aligned to their user’s interests and give servers a little more purpose for the end user.
More bridges! Matrix bridges (e.g. commune)! BlueSky bridges! Nostr bridges! Email bridges! SMS bridges! Signal bridges! XMPP bridges! IRC Bridges! More forum plugins and bridges! Q/A fediverse support! IndieWeb, just website bridges (good example bridgy-fed, but also the word press plugin! ). Meet people where they are. Make the Fediverse ubiquitous.
More selective federation rules, so you can have private server communities limit federation on per actor basis (Community/Group, User/Person, Post/Page, Comment/Note), maybe allow delays or rate limit federation, etc. Give servers and mods tools to be more granular on how they interact with the Fediverse so we get less ban hammer activity. This is most direct one to the current thread’s debate, but I think we need to do more than defederate. I think more servers should have a limited federation policy with Threads because of it’s size and influence, we want to interact with more people most of the time, but added where we need it and in ways mods and admins can handle (again more democratic systems could help here).
I also see a real potential for the fediverse everything app, but a big issue I see here is that the backend support is pretty tightly coupled with the fronts ends for most of the sites. At least there doesn’t seem to be a lot of reusue for the server and interoperability with multi UIs. That seems like the first real step towards that.
Some of these are problems for devs to solve, some for admin to implement, some are documentation issues, some are just the people that need to know about them don’t.
You’re right, we should all stop talking about and discussing problems and risks. And silently stare at each other tille someone else comes up with a solution.
Step 1 in fixing a problem is to recognize and get awareness for it.
Step 2 is garnering interest from the people who are qualified to actually make realistic proposals
Step 3 is collaborating on ideas to figure out what will or won’t be effective, and to create new ideas by returning to step 2.
Step 4 is to circle back to step 1, but for actions and implementations. Repeat ad nauseum.
**We’re Still in Step 1. ** Complaining that we aren’t getting to the next step quick enough without providing assistance to get there is incredibly meta to this process 🤔
I think what they’re saying is that we’re beating step 1 to death. Do that enough and people start ignoring the articles. If all the articles are saying the same thing, it’s not adding much to the discussion.
This article WAS a bit different though. It’s suggesting how the plan isn’t limited to microblogging or Mastodon but the fediverse as a whole, and what the process could look like
I skimmed the article and it was a bit different from the usual “here’s the definition of EEE and what I copied from the history section of the wiki page”
No. We’ll just make a new mastodon/ lemmy-verse without them. Its easy enough. At a certain point the world needs to understand that its these companies, not the format, we’re avoiding.
You are here, you are doing something. If they start with the bullshit we defederate them. (Or build new tech to keep corp influence in check, whatever we want.)
Point is: at some point me getting updates from Aunt Ethel matters a lot less to me than controlling my privacy and living my life without being advertised to every second.
“We” are a minority share of the market and no one really cares about “us”. “We” are irrelevant and we will keep being irrelevant unless we start actual and effective evangelizing for an open web.
This is not just about “avoiding”, it’s about fighting for culture change.
Do you treat the people on the same instance as you as “taking your space”? Wouldn’t it better to think of it as shared, which means that it is not really yours or anyone else’s?
If we don’t grow faster, we are always going to be irrelevant. To illustrate the point: Lemmy had a monstrous gift given by Reddit’s management and completely failed to capitalize on it. Later on, when my fediverser project was signing up hundreds of people per day and the conversations started by the bots were used by organic users in niche communities, the reactionaries here decided to treat everything as spam, instead of seeing it as a hook to convert more people.
Fast forward a few weeks, and now Lemmy is back to being a place to nothing but meta-conversation about the Fediverse and a handful of people pretending they are not using Reddit anymore.
Yes theres also a lower bound, the upper bound can and should be as high as it should go but im afraid the biggest hurdle to having safe high growth is the possable culture clash. I fear (educated guess) it will happen and im hoping it wont.
Also, from your example, reddit is not exactly the same culture as lemmy and we had a “what habits do you wanna keep (effectively adopt) or drop from reddit” post, stuff like “/s”. Id say overall few issues and should have and ive heard people encourage going as fast as possable but your saying our radicals pushed back.
True but I’d argue that, once you start looking into the more niche subreddits, there is no single culture within Reddit itself, and these thousands of smaller niches are the really important ones and could’ve helped with the migration.
My personal niche, Sbubby was pseudo migrated many diffrent places, 2 discords, a lemmy page and someone is still running the subreddit.
There was a explosion and resession, there is no hope of finding either discord without their link and the reddit mass exodus was temporary were left fractured across 4 or 5 sites.
My other niche, on the reddit side is filled with horny people and salesman. Over here, theres a ~4 user/month community thats sweet and loving but has nobody.
I’m fine with that personally. I’d much rather have a small social network containing people who are like me (at least in some respects) than a huge one filled with people I hate and garbage AI content.
Not necessarily, but Facebook certainly makes it easy to 😉 more importantly I’m not at all interested in being connected via social media with any of those people, aside I suppose from “normies” because that could really be anyone, but I’m not that bothered.
No but I don’t care about seeing them on social media. I don’t desire that at all, if I am gonna keep in touch with someone it will be in person or through direct messages.
Lemmy (heck, even reddit) is great example of why your and their goals arent mutually exclusive. If lemmy blows up, some places will stay small, some places will look like it does on bigger social media sites. I prefer slow and steady growth but an explosion of growth isnt the worst thing.
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