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.
I'm not signing up for Threads, but looking at some of the stuff other people show me coming out of there, it might end up just being yet-another-nazi-instance when they open up federation so might just end up getting blocked on those terms and not so much the "being meta/facebook" terms.
Based mastodon.art, I don’t use Mastodon anymore (microblogging isn’t my thing) but I’m glad I set my account there when I tried it. I remember the folks there being quite the lively and caring bunch.
mastodon.art is the single worst mastodon instance ever. the admins trick users into signing up so they can hold as much defederation power possible. .art defederates nearly EVERYONE.
It's not like "they" are some unknown quantity though, it's the Facebook people. It's not weird or unreasonable for people to not want the company that got fined literally a billion euros for data privacy violations just a couple of months ago to get involved in a thing they like
I’m not on Facebook but I know people who are, and they are just ordinary people who made a poor choice and didn’t read the terms and conditions. It’s all those people who you are excluding, not just Facebook employees.
All of those people are welcome to make accounts elsewhere on any Fediverse instance, though, just like they were before the launch of Threads. They're not banned. They're not being punished either. There's just going to be less stuff on Threads.
it's more like suspending someone who has engaged in bad behaviour in the past and is likely/promising to do it again. if you own your own fediverse site, you decide what the rules are and how to enforce them.
the difference between the fediverse and the corporate-controlled social media sites is that you can actually enforce your rules against larger companies on your own corner of the internet.
I know very little about the machinery that makes the fediverse work, so forgive me if this seems ignorant: What’s to prevent a malevolent entity from writing their own version of the fediverse that is compatible with the current version and uses the “EEE” philosophy to essentially take over, grow, and kill (or overwhelm) the ‘verse we all use now?
They already spread medical disinfo like wildfire, got someone who sold our state secrets to the highest bidder elected, and house sociopathic terrorists like libsoftiktok. That's enough.
What does this actually mean? That Threads users won’t be able to see content on those instances (and vice versa) once Threads gets its ActivityPub up and running?
I see a lot of of these instances citing privacy concerns, but everything we do on the fediverse is more or less open info. Unless I’m mistaken, Zucc could have already scraped Mastodon data if he wanted so I’m not sure how that’s relevant.
Now, if they were saying they didn’t want their users feeds to be flooded by Threads content, since posts there will almost undoubtedly have more engagement, then that would make sense.
Threads is a twitter competitor by meta. They plan to eventually federate with the wider fediverse and to that end have contacted some of the larger fediverse servers like Mastodon.social (not mstdn.social) to do this. People are defederating before this happens because they worry meta will negatively affect the fediverse.
No worries, I was just trying to clear up any confusion! Mostly because those two instances have a really similar name, and are easy to mix up.
I think there were a lot of rumors about stux, because he runs a couple big servers, & wouldn't sign that anit-meta pact, but I know he denies going to the nda meeting, & he announced blocking Meta today, after a big poll.
Good to know where to run if this becomes a bad thing. Mostly staying because migration isn't where I want it yet. Bit sad to see my posts and boosts go.
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