Has anyone ever considered that Threads might actually WANT the fediverse around? If you look at the Epic vs Google thing and more importantly the plethora of EU regulations that try to force big tech into being more interoperable, break up monopolies and allow users to move away from forced defaults, being connected to a working fediverse (instead of destroying it) seems like a pretty decent insurance policy. You connect to a significantly smaller network that poses no tangible threat to you and is to a large degree made up of unmonetizable privacy and open source nerds anyway and you can then conveniently point to that whenever regulators try to claim you're being a monopolist.
Yeah, I think there are a lot of possible interpretations and we can't really say for certain yet, but a lot of people seem to be honing in on and only willing to consider that surely Meta must want to destroy the fediverse. Sometimes "let's see where this goes" might just be the wiser outlook imo.
They're trying to build in Activity Pub so Threads users can connect to Mastodon etc in an opt-in way.
Nothing that would be seen as scary if any smaller actor were to do it. But because it's Meta and Meta is genuinely evil a lot of the times, people automatically assume it must be done with the worst of intentions. Which is a reasonable suspicion to have, but imo shouldn't go as far as pre-emptively pronouncing anything they do as obviously evil, when the actions itself give no such indications yet
Yes, I think the damage they can do is fairly limited at the moment. But they definitely should be scrutinized more than other instances and people should keep watch for if they try to pull anything shady at some point.
Why doesn't Mastodon / ActivityPub have an equivalent of other platform's abilities for a post author to hide certain replies for everyone, or disable replies entirely? Someone on another platform brought this up and actually I'm curious
The main answer to that is probably "funding". Mastodon has like two full time developers who shoulder a lot of different burdens and thus new features only get implemented extremely slowly.
My bad. What I meant to say was two paid full time devs. I'm sure there are the occasional contributions from other people too. And there are some different people paid to work on the mobile apps as well I think.
Apart from the "manually approving followers only from that instance" those measures also don't really seem to make sense on a user level anyway.
You can set it in your user profile that ALL accounts who want to follow you must be approved, which is already pretty useful of you don't want to be followed by random bots.
I think a baseline suspicion of anything Meta does is healthy. It just seems like it's more of a "Meta is 100% evil and whatever they touch is automatically and entirely beyond redemption" in a lot of cases imo.
If for whatever reason you never wish to interact with #Threads, you can personally block it for your account. This hides all posts and profiles from Threads, prevents anyone from Threads from following you, and stops your posts from being delivered to or fetched by Threads. Simply click the "Block domain threads.net" option on any Threads profile or post you see in Mastodon.
And there are concerns to be had for sure. But the benefit and downside of an open standard is that anyone can participate in it. And the benefit and downside of a decentralized system is that there is no central authority to decide things for everyone. So the community and server admins will have to decide how to deal with that and inevitably come to different conclusions and that's what the fediverse is all about really.
I mean, that's not entirely true. If you profile is private and you allow someone on threads to follow you, meta will get your posts when they before couldn't. And they will also get data on who on Threads you interact with, which could possibly be cross-referenced with other data about you by data brokers.
So if you interact with threads, meta will get some additional info. And personally, I think it's unlikely they are already scraping, but all but guaranteed they will harvest the data they get from plugging into the fediverse.
So there is a clear additional risk, it's just blown a bit out of proportion by many people.
We're testing a couple new follow recommendation algorithms on mastodon.online, so if you have an account there, please check Explore → People and let me know if the quality of the results has improved for you.
But the follow recommendations were already using an algorithm before. It's just a different one now (and a feature that's hard to implement without an algorithm).
You're right. An algorithm could one day be implemented in an unsuitable place/way. So how about we criticize it then when that is possibly about to happen and not when it's being used in an innocuous way. Algorithms are an extremely basic and essential part of most computing. Categorically railing against would be a bit like being mad at maths because bad people use it.
Point of no return für was denn genau? Im Schadensbegrenzungsmodus sind wir ja schon längst. Was wir jetzt schon haben ist ja schon schlimm und selbst wenn wir von heute auf morgen die Emissionen auf Null fahren würden, würde es trotzdem noch über die nächsten Jahre/Jahrzehnte erstmal noch schlimmer werden. Aber im Rahmen dieser Umstände könne wir uns halt noch immer zwischen einem schlimm, sehr schlimm und katastrophal schlimm entscheiden.
Hello! If you spend your time complaining about CWs, save your energy, set them all to open by default in your mastodon settings. Easy peasy and no-one has to read your whinging 🥰
Settings > Preferences
Always show media
Always expand posts marked with content warnings
Sure, at the risk of randomly seeing pictures of gore/war crimes
/whatever, because you auto-opened anything.
Not gonna take a position on the whole CW debate, but as a solution to the issue it's obviously subpar.
Nice to see the gecko getting some love. FWIW, there's a new web-based installer currently being developed with a much sleeker and modern interface. No idea when it'll be ready though https://github.com/openSUSE/agama
Ok, I’m sorry. But this is the sort of drama and virtue signaling shit that will doom this place the same way every Linux on the Desktop effort outside of Ubuntu and SteamOS have been doomed. Getting angry b/c of a UX decision designed to help onboard users is what we call gatekeeping.
I’m a huge fan of FediTips so I don’t want to single them out. But this attitude, I’m sorry, it’s why this place doesn’t have any diversity of users. https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110233289512157360
How is offering any other server other than (only) mastodon.social "pushing people into the deep end". If they don't even know what instances are, chances are they won't even notice the difference between being on mastodon.social or any other of the mastodon approved servers. So saying there's only the option between overwhelming people or defaulting them to mastodon.social is a completely made up false equivalency.
People have made plenty of suggestion in the github thread how to both make onboarding easy AND preserve decentralization and are obviously well aware of the benefits of making things easier, so to say this is some nerdy gatekeeping thing completely mischaracterises what's going on here.
"Getting angry b/c of a UX decision designed to help onboard users is what we call gatekeeping. "
That's the thing though. It's not JUST an UX decision. It's an UX decision that also disincentives the one thing that is Mastodon's main selling point that supposedly differentiates it from all the mainstream social networks. It's an UX decision with a severe trade-off, which makes it fair to criticize whether that trade-off is worth it imo.
If that's automatically gatekeeping then instagram users complaining the platform they use is getting increasingly tiktokified might just as well be called gatekeeping, instead of you know, people being worried the platform they use is turning into something else than what they initially signed up for in the first place.
Yeah, that's fair. Other clients can still do it differently and that's a huge mitigating factor.
Although I think it's still fair to worry that the more the tendency towards centralization grows, the more plausible it becomes that other clients or options at some point won't be allowed anymore. Something starting out as a community project, only for it to later raise the drawbridges, shut people out and become a proprietary, for profit thing has been common enough that I think jt's understandable many people are very worried by this.
Okay, but you say both that the goal is to get more users and that people can just fork off if they don't like it, which is kinda counterproductive to that goal. Because other people own servers too and they have a stake in it too. And of course they can always leave and do their own thing. But before doing that, it always seems more reasonable to try and see if you can come to a consensus and work together, which in this case means lobbying the devs, precisely because, as you said, they are the ones in charge of that part. So I don't understand why that's supposed to be such an inappropriate/misguided approach.
How should one come to a solution then in your opinion?
I think calling it brigading might be a bit harsh. Precisely because it is directing people to one very specific link (and only telling them to give a thumbs up), which while not as relevant to development as discord, still is the most relevant place accessible to all. And it can be ignored easily enough by just closing the issue.
By that definition creating and sharing a petition is pretty close to brigading as well.
(There is of course the risk of people taking it too far, whenever someone with a lot of clout addresses anything and I can agree that it might have been the responsible thing to say something like "please don't bother the devs with that elsewhere")
