They will be able to dictate how mastodon works of they become larger than the rest of the instances. Their stake in the network will make them more powerful than all the other instances combined.
There’s a concept called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (seemingly coined, in that form, in a Microsoft antitrust lawsuit). Here’s the Wikipedia page on it: …wikipedia.org/…/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
As I understand, people argue that Facebook/Meta, via Threads, will use this strategy in the long-term to either kill, or make effecitvely obsolete, the open technology behind Mastodon. If not that, then they could easily make the federation part of Threads buggy & unreliable, souring their users’ opinions on the “fediverse”.
They don’t need to control anyone; they only need to host a majority of the userbase (by being the most popular federated site). And they’re not starting from a user count of 1 or 10, unlike a lot of Mastodon sites.
Obviously, Mastodon & Lemmy, and the sites that run them, can keep chugging along just fine, but it’s argued that if Meta makes their federation implementation sub-par (or otherwise sabotages it), it’ll hurt the user-base growth of sites that use these projects (as people will see begin to see it as unreliable or what-not).
Is it as doom and gloom as people make it seem? Idk, I haven’t had time to care.
If Meta can read things you post to Lemmy? They already can if they’re so inclined; it’s all indexable by anybody with a web crawler bot; robots.txt on lemmy.world doesn’t even discourage it. If people can post to your favorite Lemmy communities from Threads? Don’t expect many people to do that - there’s enough UX mismatch it’s an awkward experience from any microblogging software.
Reading the article, they collect the data necessary to federate with an instance. If you or I were to run our own instance we would have access to the same data.
If they were to do anything with that data that they don’t have permission to do, like selling it. They would be in breach of the GDPR and fined 4% of their global annual income, and as we’ve seen with Apple, it’s not profitable to have two wildly separate versions of your product.
But again, Meta is first and foremost an advertising and data harvesting company, and many people aren’t happy at the idea of being subjected to this treatment from the vantage point of their own servers.
And just remember that a substantial amount of Lemmy users want this, because they are too blind, childish and immature to see the very real negative consequences such a move will have.
But they only care because they’re either bots or hopelessly stupid simps.
So seeing as the name is still threads does that mean he won the lawsuit someone filed against them to change the name as someone else already had that name for their product/company?
Like rules only exist if you’re not a billionaire I guess…
Would it be possible for the mastodon software to detect if users are connecting via threads and replace all images in posts with a different image - one that says e.g. telling people that Zuckerberg doesn’t care about raising tennage suicide rates through Instagram or something similar.
Mastodon wearing the face of activitypub and fediverse really leads everyone to think it’s only mastodon. Replace mastodon with activitypub, because there’s lots of projects that are actually innovating instead of Mastodons (x)shitter cloning.
I keep seeing this nonsense take. Please tell me how Threads will EEE a federated social network? It would take adoption and compliance. Whenever I see people put this take it tells me they don’t trust people of the Fedi and they don’t believe in the Fedi. Threads can’t force any implementation on the Fediverse. If Threads does anything that those that attempted to give it a fair chance doesn’t like then it will be blocked. It will be no different than Gab with the exception of it having more of our friends, relatives and people we like to follow
I’m sure this will fall on deaf ears, but here. Threads is lacking in content. Threads gets fediverse content. Instagram promotes that content, getting people to sign up and actually use it. This includes big name content creators and celebrities, authors, journalists. People on mastodon and the fediverse get used to that content. Threads starts supporting some new features or longer length or who knows what in threads. These posts are either omitted from the fediverse or are degraded to be fediverse-compatible. This annoys fediverse users who have gotten used to all the content they are now missing or seeing degraded. A significant number of them move to threads.
And on the content creator side. Threads gains a huge market share. Content creators on mastodon get used to all the threads viewers threads decides to add enhanced security or formatting requirements or some other nonsense that regularly stops mastadon creators’ content from being seen or interacted by threads users. Or threads starts heavily deprioritizing mastadon content. Either way, the mastadon creators decide to go where the audience they got used to is o threads leaving mastadon behind.
Or something more clever than either of those. Because we know meta would want to EEE if they can and there are people who will be cleaver at doing it.
That makes no sense. Since September Threads has been near 100m users. They don’t need the users from Mastodon nor the Fediverse. A good number of instances have already blocked Threads and are against big platforms. This falls under my point that people don’t trust the people here, if you believe people will be enticed or get “used to” content enough to go to Threads you are stating you don’t trust them. People can downvote me all the way, yet no one came out with a reasonable rebuttal to what I said. I believe in the foundations here, defederation and others. Threads will already be insanely massive. It’s not lacking content that was the case 2-3 months ago but not now. Threads wants in on the Fediverse not for content, not the small number of users. It’s to avoid government bodies and antitrust. They like that moderation is split amongst communities.
Threads user numbers are misleading because of how easy it is to make an account and be counted as a user due to all of the instagram tie-in.
You keep saying that people must not “trust” threads users if they think Facebook could EEE and I don’t really get what that means. I don’t honestly want mastadon to only be for true believers. It’s more interesting if a wider range of people are on there.
I didn’t say not trust Threads users. I’m saying they do not trust Fediverse users. What I mean is that in order for Threads to EEE it would take adoption and compliance. It would take the masses here being too entangled with Threads that even if they do things people don’t like, those instances & users will simply start using Threads or bend completely to their will. Otherwise, people will block Threads and operate as usual. That’s what I believe will happen but many don’t.
Sorry, that was a big typo in my comment. That’s what I meant. I don’t want mastadon to only have true believers. I want more of everyone and Facebook will use EEE strategies to bootstrap threads off of mastadon and then harvest everyone but the true believers away.
I don’t see that happening. As long as those that taint Mastodon’s reputation are kept away things will be fine. “True believers” do not want more of everyone and that is part of the problem. People have various social needs that many on Mastodon don’t care about nor respect. If Threads wins them over by being more welcoming and accepting that says a lot. But, I must be fair. I have seen improvement within the culture and people actively working to be more open to others . I care more about users having their needs met than any one specific platform.
To all the people wondering about metas intentions in this it’s not the big bad corporation taking down the upstart competition. All the people saying it’s EEE can’t show any sign metas doing this or even wants to because the strategy doesn’t work, any time a company does it it either doesn’t take off or they get brought up on anti-trust laws. Show me a standard that was destroyed by EEE and I’ll show you a standard that never took off in the first place. All the usual examples given, email, java, html, remain open standards to this day.
The truth is the fediverse isn’t competition to meta, it’s a fraction of the size and is populated by users who would never use meta services in the first place. They can pretend it’s a competitor though. If twitter does actually collapse and people switch to threads meta will face anti-trust suits for owning the three largest social media platforms. If they add activity pub support though they can point to the fediverse and say it’s competition, even if it’s only 1 % of the platform. They also have to deal with EU interoperability laws that might start getting enforced.
TL;DR this is about compliance for meta, not conquest.
The platform never really took off. It was a niche messaging platform before Facebook and Google and went back to being one after they left. I have yet to see any evidence that Google or Facebook helped or hurt xmpp, just speculation and anger that it didn’t take off.
> make a new messenger using a niche protocol > new users choose your messenger because it is objectively the best after you dumped unreasonable amounts of cash into it > userbase grows, in large parts because the small messenger is interoperable so you can say “hey, if other company wanted to they could just implement [protocol] for you, we are already doing that” > once userbase reaches critical mass, pull the plug on the protocol > users with long chat histories and contact books are now more or less stuck on your platform whether they like it or not because getting people to switch suddenly means two messengers instead of one for them, not a good proposition to make.
XMPP did take off while it was in Messenger, Facebook decided to kill it with its superior reach because it was a step-ladder rather than something actually useful to them. Facebook will absolutely use the Mastodon interoperability as a marketing trick “Hey guys, if you have friends that don’t like threads they can use another platform and still talk with you”. They’ll use it to distinguish threads from twitter until they feel like they don’t need it anymore. Then they’ll find some sort of technical excuse and pull the plug on ActivityPub support.
then they’ll find some sort of technical excuse and pull the plug on ActivityPub support
How do they do this without running a foul of regulators? People are already mad at meta and want to break them up for having instagram and Facebook, if they add the last big social media platform every politician right and left will be lining up to take them down. There’s a reason they never bought twitter despite being able to 10x over. Combine that with new EU interoperability laws and there’s no way meta could get away with that.
Email an open standard? Sure, on the surface it is. Running your own mail server and getting your emails delivered to gmail/outlook users? Good luck.
Who cares what the form is, if the substance is the problem?
Same with web. To this day, nobody besides google has the possibility to compete in the browser space. So much shit was added to the web standards, that you need an incredible amount of resources to produce a modern browser engine (I am talking one that users can use for their daily stuff, not lynx). You have chrome, you have all the chromium clones, you have Firefox which is anyway paid by google, and you have safari. Period.
Can confirm, my mail server does just about everything I found it needs to do to not get flagged spam. And it doesn’t except for Gmail. Not even Microsoft has “Spam” filters that strict beyond checking the basic records.
On the browsers, I think in large parts Google should have never been allowed to push for their own Browser in their own products simply because the have monopolies in so many of them. Free market this and that, IRL it doesn’t work without some regulations and imo (American) Tech companies have been allowed too much freedom to abuse the market whichever way they like.
Absolutely. Your email has an image? Maybe spam. Your email does not have an unsubscribe link, even if has nothing to do with transactional emails? Spam. Your email is from an address or domain which did not send many emails before? Spam.
It feels the meme from parks and recreation.
And you can’t reliably even know if your message was received or not, the only way to do that is asking directly through some other channel…so the fact that email is open is essentially just an empty quality.
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