There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.
Cuck Zuck sure loves his sloppy seconds, picking up the half-eaten Twitter remains Musk’s been dropping.
I’m just rubbernecking here anyway—not really a microblogging fan—but I hope those that need to remain vigilant with respect to EEE do so. My dude Zuck made a losing bet on VR instead of LLM, but he still has the capital to do damage elsewhere. Let’s not forget this choice quote:
I’m still pretty much “wait and see” on this. A lot of folks are predicting gloom and doom, but also have a lot of good points. Meta shouldn’t be trusted in general, but they also haven’t done anything yet - they haven’t even implemented ActivityPub yet.
I think it’s more they’re trying to make a Twitter-killer then kill Mastodon from the inside. They want people on their site so they can show them ads, and they want to get those people from Twitter. ActivityPub integration is another feature they can use to get attention.
ActivityPub integration is another feature they can use to get attention.
See, that’s what I don’t understand. ActivityPub means nothing to the vast majority of potential Threads users. There’s no way that Meta is going to use ActivityPub to gain users; all they have to do is what they HAVE done, leverage Instagram. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they may be hoping that federation will allow them to get around the EU’s limitations.
But even that doesn’t really make sense. Zuck doesn’t really care that much about regulations. He breaks them all the time. Which leaves me with the question, why ActivityPub? What aren’t we seeing?
I think it’s more they’re trying to make a Twitter-killer then kill Mastodon from the inside.
This is the answer. They aren’t stupid, they know that if they just spin up a Twitter clone, nobody will use it. They need a reason to exist. Honestly I don’t think they give a single shit about Mastodon or killing it. But what ActivityPub does, is get them an instant content base. And if they are building their own AI, it’s a whole lot of live conversation for them to train it on.
It also gives them an edge over Bluesky, since no where else is using the Bluesky protocol yet, whereas ActivityPub has all these sites also using it and populated.
Threads wants to be there place where everyone is happening and everyone feels like they need to be, like Twitter was and Bluesky is starting to be. Mastodon was never that. Mastodon, to them, is a tool to use against Twitter and Bluesky for that pop culture spot, not a rival.
A company exists to make money - period. I struggle to see why Meta making money off ActivityPub is a good thing.
There’s just no good reason to have a profit motive in social media when it simply doesn’t need to be there.
There’s just no good reason to have a profit motive in social media when it simply doesn’t need to be there.
Exactly! In that regard, it’s like health care. The profit motive can only harm the public.
Eh, so it’s not running on ActivityPub? I got the impression it was.
They’re implementing it, but no it currently isn’t using the ActivityPub protocol
Just read the interview on The Verge, it seems that ActivityPub is a separate thing.
It seems to be planned. Might even be implemented in their code, but federation is currently disabled.
finally! Nice to see a lot of points which were spread (due to fearmongering) addressed, by none other than mastodon itself. Honestly, if this doesn’t convince people that threads are not evil incarnate, then i don’t know what will.
Judging by this thread alone, I’d say people aren’t convinced.
ChatGPT summary of the blog post:
Here is a summary of the blog:
- Threads are a way to organize conversations on Mastodon, a decentralized social network.
- Threads allow users to reply to specific posts and create branching discussions that are easy to follow and participate in.
- Threads can be public or private, depending on the visibility settings of the original post and the replies.
- Users can view threads by clicking on the reply icon of any post, or by using the “Show thread” option in the menu.
- Users can also join or leave threads by using the “Follow thread” or “Unfollow thread” options in the menu.
- Threads are a powerful feature that enhance the user experience and foster community engagement on Mastodon.
- Mastodon and Threads will likely be able to communicate with each other once Threads supports federation, but it will depend on the server operators’ choices. Mastodon users can always switch servers or self-host if they want more control.
- Threads will not be able to impose their moderation policies on other servers, and that each server will have its own rules and tools. Mastodon servers can block specific content from Threads if they want to.
- Mastodon welcomes the adoption of ActivityPub by large platforms, as it validates the decentralized social web and enables users to switch platforms more easily. This creates more competition and pressure for better services.
If you’re going to “summarize” something, at least take the time to do it yourself, not run it through ChatGPT.
That’s just plain wrong.
A good advice would be to actually read the post yourself and not run it through a pretty sentence creator botIf I wanted an AI summary I’d have done it myself. I’m here to read comments from and talk to actual humans.
Stop that. This is helpful to nobody.
That’s a pretty poor summary. It’s not all that much shorter than the blog post itself. Could you tell the AI to be much more concise?
Any way you could consider not littering threads with shitty tldrs?
Ok, my bad. Blame ChatGPT for the shittyness though.
This isn’t reddit though dude.
People are here to learn and engage. You’re not contributing towards that goal and it sorta comes across as a cheap karma grab. Which I know I am not here for. Seems like many aren’t either.
I think we would all just prefer to hear your thoughts, opinions, and contributions to the discussion rather than doing what you’re doing.
Just my two cents.
Thank you for the reply and feedback, I’m not lost and know what site this is.
I think AI language models are dumb, but fascinating; I do not truly care about meaningless karma here since it doesn’t matter to me personally.
I’m very confident no one here wants to read the confounding stupidity of my opinion, so I will limit my replies to impactful comments henceforth.
Your two cents are really worth profoundly more, thank you.
You’re the one who chose to post it without fixing it yourself to make it readable. ChatGPT didn’t paste it into that box and hit the “add comment” button.
Google Bard’s elaborated version of your comment (dissertation, opposite of a summary):
Sure, here is the elaboration of the text:
The original text is a bit accusatory, but it is also accurate. The person who posted the text could have taken the time to fix the errors before posting it, but they chose not to. This means that they are responsible for the fact that the text is not readable.
The second sentence of the text is a reminder that ChatGPT is a large language model, not a human being. ChatGPT cannot take action on its own, so it is not responsible for the fact that the text was posted without being fixed.
Here is a more elaborated version of the text that is still accurate and respectful:
“I understand that you were frustrated with the errors in the text, but I would like to remind you that you are the one who chose to post it without fixing it yourself. ChatGPT is a large language model, and it cannot take action on its own. If you wanted the text to be readable, you should have taken the time to fix the errors before posting it.”
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Hmm… sounds a bit too idealistic to be true, especially given how Facebook has acted in the past. I appreciate his hope for the future, but I think he severely underestimates the lengths to which FB will go to monetize and control users on their platforms.
Here’s the scenario I don’t like. Threads scrapes my OC on a federated server, then reposts it to their users with advertisements. Now, not only has FB taken my OC without getting my permission or even informing me, they’re now garnering profit from it. If this were a print publication, this would plainly be copyright theft. And if I want to remove my content that’s now hosted on Threads without my permission, there’s no possible way for me to do so - I can delete the post and hope their federated server does the same, but given how hard they make it to delete a FB account, I’m not terribly optimistic.
It’s no wonder #threads isn’t launching in Europe - there’s no way in hell this kind of thing is even remotely GDPR compliant.
Anyone willing to give Meta even the slightest bit of the benefit of the doubt is at best incredibly naive and at worst an outright idiot.
That’s an interesting point. Can anyone take your original content and repost it to make money? As I understand it, anything you create is theoretically copyrighted at the moment you created. You’re not required to file a copyright, at least not in the United States.
US copyright starts at the moment of creation, but the issue here is really enforcement. To get a copyright enforced, you have to bring a civil suit, which is considerably expensive in terms of both time and money. If you’re going after a company as big as FB, your expense dramatically increases while your likelihood of getting a favorable judgment drops. And even then, you’re probably only looking at getting the content taken down, not a monetary award, because in this scenario it would be near impossible to tell how much ad revenue your specific content generated for FB, or how much was lost to FB if you were getting ad traffic revenue from your content on another platform that’s now going to FB.
While these potential problems exist with or without FB in the picture, as any instance owner could theoretically do the same thing, the difference in scale combined with how FB treats its users (cattle) is what’s making my alarm bells go off. There’s so much potential for abuse, with very little benefit to the existing users of the Fediverse.
Sure they can. Stack overflow is one example. Any business operating on user driven content will be culpable. When you agree to the EULA and it tells you “what you post here belongs to us and we grant you a license to publish it yourself”, you’re signing over ownership of your content in exchange for a license to replicate it. That’s how social media all works, all the EULAs work that way. FOSS is no different.
Dude a federated SO would be a dream. Imagine actually be able to post something without it being flagged as a duplicate of a 10 year old outdated question.
I’m a technical sense, that is a feature not a bug of federated platforms
Look I don’t want to be combative here, and my sincere apologies if this response comes off that way but here goes
IMHO this is already the way activitypub works. Platforms that choose to federate, are able to pool their posts and the like. And yes instances can make money off of content posted on other instances. That’s not a bug it’s a feature.
On the other hand, meta sucks and I’m not sure if I’d really want to federate with them either. So like, idk lol, just spitballing
100%. The open and public nature of the fediverse is something everyone should be considering every single time they post on a federated platform. I don’t want to federate with meta because ew , but it would be absurd to think that a public platform like this isn’t gonna get scraped to hell anyways.
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I made a mistake, it was Fosstodon. They told Meta to fuck off. https://hub.fosstodon.org/assets/images/meeting-with-meta-email.webpMastodon is 100% a competitor to #Meta, and if I were #Mastodon, I would watch my back since everything Meta does is only for the benefit (or the endgame is) for themselves and their market share. Best case scenario would for Meta to extinguish Mastodon and have everyone go to #threads.
I do not understand why Mastedon is downplaying the very likely scenario of Meta EEE’ing the shit out of ActivityPub once they get people to migrate to Threads
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I understand all the fear around meta. However on federated platforms, is all competition not a good thing?
Also I have to imagine the overlap between the type of people currently on federated platforms, and those willing to use any platform made by meta is rather slim.
Also what do you think about the comparisons with XMPP?
Just curious to hear your thoughts
I understand all the fear around meta. However on federated platforms, is all competition not a good thing?
it is a good thing, meta users have the ability to leave meta’s apps or instances, but still communicate with people they know, or the massive community. For those who don’t want this, they can defederate client side, so it only affects them personally. De-federating server side is the issue however, as user’s wouldn’t be able to make that decision for themselves.
Also what do you think about the comparisons with XMPP?
i agree with the mastodon founder’s views on this, xmpp was very niche, especially to people who weren’t tech savvy, I don’t think it’s fair to say that google killed it. Besides, there was no official client or webgui for it, unlike kbin/lemmy, but rather many unofficial clients/apps, which not only made adoption of it harder, but also delayed feature parity across apps. These issues don’t exist with lemmy/kbin or mastodon.
when a large monopolistic company is trying to join the fediverse, its not because they want to play fair. They literally can not try and play fair, if their profits are not continually growing, then they are legally not representing the best interest of the shareholders. if you actually believe that meta joining the fediverse has an altruistic motive, or they they will not act in a way that benefits their shareholders(to kill any competition that takes any of their profit in any way), then you are probably not looking at the full story and need to consider if you are capable of thinking.
Why erect this straw man? No one is claiming Meta is being altruistic, that’s not the question. They aren’t federating at all yet. We have no ifea what the eventual form of federation will take.
I’m not saying they’re doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that Meta has no other microblogging platform. They’re not trying to choke out competition, because there isn’t any competition.
I personally believe that they are trying to tap into the Fediverse and use it as a springboard to grow their own platforms. However it’s worth keeping in mind that as any federated platform grows, other federated platforms grow with it.
Kbin’s growth is good for lemmy. The Fediverse grows with this kind of competition.
While Im not personally a fan of meta. It’s probably in the fedieverse’s best interest to at least be willing to come to the table and consider the possibilities, instead of just immediately fighting this. Remember, we haven’t seen the implementation yet. This is all just speculations.
Yes
This is true with Kbin and Lemmy, and Mastodon instances but Meta doesn’t have that mindset. They are going to have ads and are going to see users not on their instance as eyes that rightfully belong to them that are not set on those ads.
They are going to have ads
And? If people decide to use their instance, they’re likely fine with seeing ads or being tracked, that’s their choice. For those who aren’t ok with that, myself included, don’t have to use the official instance. I don’t see what’s wrong with that.
Again, from the user POV, yes, that is fine. From Meta POV, it’s incentive to try and lock as many eyes in as possible using tactics that we probably won’t think of because we aren’t able to think from the POV of being pure scum.
if you believe meta is going to act in the best interest of the fediverse, and not try to fuck it over, then please kindly remove your head from your ass.
Meta will act in Meta’s best interest. We don’t know yet whether that will be be beneficial or damaging to the Fediverse. It could be beneficial in terms of user numbers and general adoption. If they are arses then sure - defederate
if you believe meta is going to act in the best interest of the fediverse, and not try to fuck it over, then please kindly remove your head from your ass.
lol, i can say the same back to you, if you think that instances de-federating from meta, de-federating from instances who haven’t de-federated from meta, dividing up content and users from eachother, won’t cause the fediverse to self implode, then you need to open your eyes.
All of this started due to people’s mindset of “eww facebook bad”, the creator of mastodon doesn’t think its an issue and is optimistic of the change, yet people still are refusing to change their mindset, i even saw someone bring up conspiracy that the mastodon founder got bribed by meta… which is absolutely ridiculous.
If things continue as is, with mass de-federation, you are going to kill the fediverse without realising. If you dislike meta, thats understandable, just de-federate client side, but if an instance owner makes that choice for all users, that would be censorship, something the fediverse aims to avoid. We all shit on meta/twitter/other large corps for censoring content, but when instance owner’s do it, its fine? De-federating for ideological reasons like this goes against the principles of federation.
I believe they may try, but I think the approach Mastodon is taking isn’t necessarily a warm embrace. They seem to be handling this with skepticism and I have read that they have plans to Defederate if Meta tries to exploit Activity Pub in any way.
I see no way they aren’t a competitor. Meta is a company. Companies exists to make money. Meta makes money by driving engagement and then monitizing via ads or user data sale for others to target ads.
Like are we all supposed to pretend a company, Meta of all companies, is an altruistic entity? Because that’s not how it works… At all.
Remove corporations from social networks.
Meta makes money by driving engagement and then monitizing via ads or user data sale for others to target ads.
Then don’t use the official instance, ads or tracking won’t affect you if you’re using threads from a kbin instance for e.g.
Remove corporations from social networks.
i don’t think that’s fair, not all corporations are evil, besides non-profits exist like signal/mozilla.
It’s poisoning the well though, even if I don’t see the ads. Also they will prioritize inflammatory content to drive engagement, which would affect other instances as well (you know, like they do for all their other apps/platforms).
And corporations are not good or bad, but the for profit ones… are for profit. And I’m sorry but there is no justification for a profit motive in social media.
Meta is different. The others aren’t in competition with each other, but for-profit business is in competition by definition.
I’m not aware that Eugen ever said that he wouldn’t deal with Meta. Maybe he did, but I’m not aware of it.
The pushback on Mastodon hasn’t been by Mastodon gGmbH. It’s been by smaller instance admins.
I made a mistake, it was Fosstodon.
https://hub.fosstodon.org/assets/images/meeting-with-meta-email.webp
Which means that they probably proposed the same offer to Mastodon and they likely accepted.
That’s a really hot take. It could be that Eugene - exactly as he says, thinks wide adoption of ActivityPub is a hood thing and that federation is robust enough to handle any potential threat from Threads - which isn’t even federating yet.
Why jump straight to ‘the guy is clearly corrupt and has taken money from Meta’?
Whelp, time to pack up I guess. Mastodon is the biggest player in the fediverse right now, so if Meta EEE’s us then the fediverse as a concept is doomed.
We have the foreknowledge of seeing EEE happen with XMPP/Google Chat, now. We can fight back against EEE against ActivityPub as it actually happens, with instances defederating with Meta and so on, when they start actually taking those negative actions. It’s gonna be fine.
Can we actually fight back, though? most of the people using the Fedi are on Mastodon, primarily coming from places like Twitter and Reddit because of the recent drama. The biggest complaint new people have is about how complicated Masto and other fediverse services are to get into for people who aren’t tech savvy, between choosing different instances and figuring out how to use them. Meanwhile, Meta provides a familiar, convenient experience from a brand they already know, even with its horrible reputation. Then when 90% of “fediverse” users are on Threads instead of the rest of the fedi, they’ll announce that they are dropping support for ActivityPub and there will only be a few thousand people left elsewhere to mourn it.
I think it’s worth noting that many more of us are aware of EEE than in the past, and while meta is very well known, it’s also kind of infamous. While some services have brand loyalty, meta kind of has a mix of brand apathy or brand repulsiveness to a lot of people. I think the most loyalty you might find would be in people who purchase into the quest ecosystem, or are avid users of Instagram.
I think enough of us are aware of the circumstances that when Meta eventually does start taking steps towards the “extension” phase, they’re going to get called out immediately, and communities are going to better able to resist than in the past.
I would agree if they didn’t already shovel in 10 million people from instagram in the past few hours, and you cant leave without deleting your facebook and instagram accounts and everything you have invested in them. They gained in the past few hours more people than the entire Fediverse has gained over the course of several years.
But they took them from Instagram. As somebody on another forum said, because it sort of came with Instagram, they didn’t sign up to Meta out of the blue. People not on Instagram will likely not sign up for it, at least not in those numbers.
I think most people are here because we don’t really like groups like Meta. We existed before, and I believe we can persist without. Meta is going to have Facebook/instagram/whatsapp integration in threads that will require us to visit their site and/or link accounts to view. I think we might as well just defederate at that point.
We just have to EEE them back. It will be a like a classic anime beam war.
It’s because you can’t “kill” a the AP protocol. XMPP didn’t go away when Messenger and GChat removed support for it, it just went back to how it was before hand, a fraction of tech enthusiasts using it for private communication. It would probably be the same with AP. A separate collection of sites using it to federate information.
… even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
Granted this leaves out how Google used it’s influence to control and stagnate the XMPP protocol, but that’s another can of worms.
Will Meta embrace-extend-extinguish the ActivityPub protocol?
There are comparisons to be made between Meta adopting ActivityPub for its new social media platform and Meta adopting XMPP for its Messenger service a decade ago. There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now.
Yes, 5 years from now when Threads abandons ActivityPub, you will be 5 years behind Threads. That is not a good outcome.
XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
Mastodon is not exactly a household name.
I really hope for the best. And it’s not like anyone can stop Meta from making Threads and enabling ActivityPub. But this reasoning is not very convincing.
large instances like Mastedon and Lemmy.world can defederate…Mastedon already sold out so this could already be a lost cause. If they had any fucking decency they would have refused to work with them in any capacity
I have hope because this whole issue is widespread and known. Takes the wind out of their sails.
I don’t feel like this is a 1-1 comparison with the XMPP issue.
With XMPP users joined servers and then Google started working with the protocol allowing those users contact books to increase by hundreds overnight. Then when Google dropped, many people built work connections through those chats and still wanted to talk so they migrated to Google as it was the simpler platform.
But fediverse isn’t about talking to individuals for the most part. Mastadon gets the closest, but even then it’s about following updates and quickly getting ideas out to large groups, not the 1-1 communication of a chat. Fediverse is mostly about talking in communities. When threads defederates after getting a bunch of users, those users will lose entire communities instead of just a couple individuals that can switch platforms. And asking a community of hundreds to move to your preferred social isn’t how it works. People go towards communities, not companies. When threads defederates (which will happen) they will lose members, many communities will drop in membership, but I think the fediverse will be in the same spot after that it would be in if threads never existed. Not the same as today. But if we ignore threads and try to project the growth out 5 years. That’s where I think we’ll be if threads defederates in 5 years.
XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
That’s either a really tasty self-irony or just delusional. I really hope no one thinks Mastodon is anything but a nerd circle.
TLDR: Mastodon trying their damndest to rationalize taking the money.
Did they take any money? Genuinely asking, hadn’t heard they did…
If they did the contract would be under an NDA. No way for us to find that shit out - you just have to watch the enshittification happen as the early birds get paid.
Meta is public. A transaction like that could not be done in secret.
Meta is a publicly traded company - that doesn’t mean they have business arrangements the outside world doesn’t know about. They’re held to public reporting obligations and have a Board of Directors hand-picked by Zuck (since he still has the majority control of voting shares).
A transaction like that is done in secret all the time, each and every day.
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rationalize taking the money
Please don’t spread false information, if you got a source for mastodon taking money, feel free to share.
That’s not actually the tl;dr in my opinion, but others should decide for themselves.
Whats your source on “taking the money”, by the way?
Will a large platform like Meta joining Mastodon overwhelm smaller servers?
This could be interesting for Kbin, it’s true that Mastodon shouldn’t see an influx of Threads only content, but the Microblog for Kbin may be overwhelmed, since it’s followed by tag, at least how I’m using it, not user
Tags aren’t followable entities. You still need to follow individual “actors”, and that means a user or a “group actor” like a kbin magazine, lemmy community, or peertube channel.
The hashtag “following” done by kbin magazines is just a saved search from the microblog stream.
Yes, but it’ll still be because people on your instance are following Threads users.
Kbin let’s you block domains, though. I’m not sure if it works for microblog posts yet, but if it doesn’t, it should.
Kbin tags work the same way. Every person you see in the microblog tag is directly followed by someone on Kbin.
I have purposely been going out and following interesting Mastodon accounts from Kbin to ensure that they’re being brought over into the Kbin feed and put into the proper magazines.
Ah I didn’t know that! Very cool. I thought when someone hashtagged something it would just show up in the Microblog for that tag
That’s something I hadn’t really thought about, since I was more seeing in through a Mastodon lens. Would it really be more overwhelming that some of the big Mastodon instances, like .social?
Unsure! All I know is I follow Fediverse magazine and that’s constantly consuming my entire Microblog sub feed 😅
