Meta/Instagram launched a new product called Threads today (working title project92). It adds a new interface for creating text posts and replying to them, using your Instagram account. Of note, Meta has stated that Threads plans to support ActivityPub in the future, and allow federation with ActivityPub services. If you actually look at your Threads profile page in the app your username has a threads.net tag next to it - presumably to support future federation.
Per the link, a number of fediverse communities are pledging to block any Meta-directed instances that should exist in the future. Thus instance content would not be federated to Meta instances, and Meta users would not be able to interact with instance content.
I’m curious what the opinions on this here are. I personally feel like Meta has shown time and time again that they are not very good citizens of the Internet; beyond concerns of an Eternal September triggered by federated Instagram, I worry that bringing their massive userbase to the fediverse would allow them to influence it to negative effect.
I also understand how that could be seen to go against the point of federated social media in the first place, and I’m eager to hear more opinions. What do you think?
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From a post on Mastodon comparing privacy policies. Meta gonna pillage the village.
https://mastodon.social/@llebrun/110664586216685040
Ok dear gods whyyyyyyyyyyyy does a social media app need access to all that. Burn it down. Burn it all to the ground
Don’t federated with Meta
The day this instance federates with Meta is the day I leave. They, and any other big corporations, can fuck all the way off. We have seen where that path leads time and time again.
I’m sick of Meta
I think the majority are against federating with meta so we’re probably safe but same.
Well said, and same.
Companies invading the fediverse was always going to happen, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You get more users, a rock solid instance, possibly more support in coding, and maybe more. There’s no reason to have bots essentially copying content from a place that offers federation
There’s also definite downsides, federating could be expensive for smaller instances to handle all that content, potential pressure for more tracking/less porn/more ad friendly code built into the system, making communities better through proprietary extensions to slowly cannibalize the rest of the instances.
Blanket decisions to block corporate instances is probably a bad move, though keeping a short leash is wise.
But think of the type of content meta/IG is going to be creating. It’s going to be a ton of garbage self centered wanna be influencer posts. A never ending content generation machine. If the entire feed of IG was federated, the All view would be squashed with IG garbage.
Of course you’re gonna have “low quality influencers”, but if you’re attracting THOSE people, you’ve already attracted a massive audience of other people. Those low quality influencers wouldn’t be coming over in the first place if there wasn’t a massive audience to appeal to in the first place. And if there is a big audience on these platforms, then you’re gonna have the higher quality creators come over.
I make YouTube videos, but I’m hesitant to fully dump Twitter because I’m losing out on a critical connection pathway with my (admittedly small) audience. If I could know that a majority of my audience was on mastodon AND that I could collaborate with other creators in my niche, I’d fully switch over and delete Twitter from my phone in a heartbeat.
But I can’t do that because everyone uses Twitter.
Threads is letting people get their foot in the door for the Fediverse. And I think it’s really sucky that, if I want to reach the biggest audience, I might just have to make an account on Threads, because practically all the instances out there are defederating from it.
Lemmy/Mastodon et al basically exist on a principle of ethics that outweighs the desire of “wanting to reach the biggest audience”. People have deliberately chosen this platform over twitter and reddit, deliberately gone from high traffic social media to a platform with a much more limited userbase, because of those principles. Of course the hope is that one day this platform will grow as big or bigger than the old platforms, but organically and on its own principles.
It seems counterproductive to suddenly ignore those principles for the sake of traffic, just because a major corporate player suddenly wants a bite of this platform as well.
If you want visibility and a big audience on account of your career then by all means set up accounts on every platform you can think of, that is all part of that game, but don’t try to force this platform to become one of them just because of that desire for visibility.
Exactly. No offense but I don’t care about your business.
If I walk into a bar,I just want a drink. I’m not looking to get advertised to. If I go to a park, why would I want to see fifteen billboards advertising to me?
Is there really nowhere to go where we aren’t always the product? Lemmy and the fediverse at large are basically saying that since we are the content creators and the users and chip in to keep it all going that we aren’t being mined for data and swamped by bullshit. I’m good with that.
I can see where you’re coming from, especially with the part about how people came to Lemmy and Mastodon to get away from the type of people who want to reach the biggest audience. But I guess that leads us down the path of, “What SHOULD Lemmy be?”
I recently ditched both Reddit and Twitter for their fediverse equivalents. But they haven’t been true replacements because they don’t have the users to replicate the sheer amount of content. The mildlyinteresting subreddit has 22 million subscribers. The equivalent on lemmy.world has 100 subscribers. The last post was 3 days ago. I’m not even a fan of that subreddit, but the fact that such a weird type of content can keep so many users engaged speaks to how many people are out there searching for mildly interesting things to share.
Lemmy just doesn’t have that.
I guess it all comes down to this. I don’t care that much about expanding my content creator presence into Mastodon/Twitter, that’s just not the type of creator I am. But (I think) Lemmy could use more creators. Not even “content creators” in the traditional sense of youtubers or twitch streamers, but random people making posts on their favorite communities. If someone’s favorite subreddit is mildlyinteresting, and they come over here and see that the biggest mildlyinteresting community only has 100 subscribers, what do you think they’re gonna do?
Which leads back into the question, “What SHOULD Lemmy be?”
Do you think it should be a reddit equivalent with as many users as that has? With as many super-niche communities as you can think of?
Or should it be a somewhat niche thing with an admittedly passionate community?
Maybe I’m just kinda imposing my own beliefs here (as someone looking for a reddit replacement), but I’d prefer the former. And you don’t need super high quality users to post on communities like mildly interesting or whatever, you just need interested people. You need numbers.
All is currently like 40% porn, 40% shit posting, and 20% other, you aren’t losing anything by adding Instagram.
Exactly, the way it should be.
You should never gatekeep though, it looks bad in my opinion
I won’t maintain a membership on any platform that is federated with Meta in any way. That’s an absolute, 100% dealbreaker. Same with Microsoft, Google, Amazon or Apple. Anything they touch turns to assgarbage.
In the 1990s, Microsoft had an internal strategy called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft saw the emerging Internet as a threat to their business, so they wanted to kill it. The basic idea was:
- Embrace: Develop software compatible with an existing standard
- Extend: Add features that are not part of the standard, creating interoperability issues
- Extinguish: Using their dominant market share, snuff out competitors who don’t or can’t support the non-standard protocol
It was working for Microsoft, and was a contributing factor in their killing off Netscape. For those too young to remember, Mozilla is the open-source “liferaft” that Netscape created before their business was destroyed by Microsoft. But, these days it’s effectively controlled by Google, who provides 85% of their funding, as long as they keep Google as the default Firefox search engine and don’t rock the boat.
The only thing that stopped Microsoft from destroying the open Internet was the antitrust case brought against them by the US Department of Justice. Antitrust action is the only thing that has kept innovation happening in tech. The antitrust case against IBM from 1969 to 1982 allowed for the rise of Microsoft. The antitrust case against Microsoft allowed for the rise of Google. Many people think we’re overdue for strong antitrust actions against Google and Facebook/Meta.
Facebook bought out every social competitor they could: Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. They can’t buy out the Fediverse, but they have to see it as an existential threat. Because of that, they’re undoubtedly going to try to use their near-monopoly status to kill off the Fediverse.
The “Embrace” stage will likely be just implementing ActivityPub. That will convince a lot of people that Meta is really on their side, and are working hard to be a good Fediverse citizen. They’ll probably even hire people who are current developers working on the ActivityPub standard, or who have developed key ActivityPub apps.
The “Extend” stage will probably involve adding features to “ActivityPub Alpha” which Threads uses but nothing else uses. It might involve some Meta-specific things, like embedding Instagram in an unusual way. It might involve something that is really expensive for an independent server, but affordable if you’re a multi-billion dollar company, like some kind of copyright check, or flagging if something is AI-generated. The features they’re likely to add won’t be offensive, they’ll probably be good ideas. It’s just that they’ll add them before going through the standards process, and so standards-compliant ActivityPub implementations will seem old and outdated. That will convince many people to move their accounts to Threads, or will at the least reduce the growth for non-Threads ActivityPub.
The “Extinguish” phase will be like when Google shut down Google Reader. Why bother having a standards-compliant way of doing things when usage is so low?
So… yeah, block Meta.
I know I’m late to the conversation, but I stopped using Facebook 10 years ago. I left Reddit after Apollo stopped working, and now that Twitter is heading the same way I would prefer to not associate with them. I agree it stinks that it’s yet another platform that splits people up deciding how and whom they interact with, but I do not want meta to mess with something that works the way it should without corporate’s fingers in the cookie jar.
Excuse me for being crass, I sincerely apologize, but fuck Threads.
I am completely against defederating
I seriously doubt meta is going to have an open federation policy anyway. It’s definitely going to be a tiered white list of Meta-approved Activitypub apps and instances. With built-in monetization for devs in the Activitypub “market.”
Honestly it’s what reddit should have done if they were smart. Figure out a way to monetize through the API by pulling third party apps into a walled garden.
I use Facebook and Instagram to post pictures and to stay in contact with friends and family. That being said, I don’t trust Zuck and I believe his intentions will always be to take-over and monetize. When I come to the Fediverse, I expect to see fresh, new, progressive, interesting ideas from the communities I join. And although I am older age-wise, I can see that Meta is tired and out of the loop. I would vote for not federating with Meta.
I don’t have any firm opinions yet. I definitely feel the knee-jerk temptation to not federate with them, but on the other hand I guess federated Facebook products is pretty much what I want from them.
I don’t care about Threads very much (at least yet), but I know a lot of people where my only way to get in contact with them is Facebook Messenger. So if I could contact them without needing to have a facebook account myself, I’d be quite happy.
Can Meta scrape the data off other apps like mastodon from federated communities? I don’t exactly know how that works. I’m assuming mastodon and other not profit based apps don’t track any data so how would meta joining the fediverse change it?
I think it’s all but given that meta would have the largest number of users using its apps in the fediverse. Threads already has 2 million sign-ups in hours so it would be a miss to just defederate from it and lock down millions of users from interacting with meta users. Let’s see how it goes.
Edit: 5 million sign-ups in 4 hours according to zuck
They can scrape without federation. Scrapers are just scripts that will go to websites, collect the html data, keep what has been deemed valuable, collect all of the links to other pages on that page, stick them onto a stack and pick one off that stack to continue to the next page and keep going.
yeah, so it really does not matter whether they are federated or not as far as our info goes. The only difference is how much content we see and how many people come in and out.
Don’t federate, they are a terrible company.
Personally I’ll support instances that choose to tell Zuckybags to fuck right off, and I think the fediverse is pretty well set up to be able to do that.
But I guess the bigger question how is how we protect our information, since it seems like everything that happens here is pretty wide open.
The big companies will all come for places like this and trawl for “genuine human input” to feed their AI cashbabies, and what we create has value. Maybe even the shitposts. So how do we protect that?
There’s no way to protect against that. They can still have a scraper set up to crawl the fediverse without threads ever federating with any of the instances.
Yeah, I get that, and I don’t think the solution is a walled garden. But I do think it will become more of an issue as these companies get more aggressive about going after any data they can find.
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The difference is that Reddit was looking to IPO off that data, here that won’t happen. We were the product there.
If you’re ok with your data being used, maybe there’s a way to opt into that. But I would rather it be something data trawlers had to forcibly ask first rather than just stealing it and then saying “oopsies”
It’s not really fair to call it stealing.
This is an open source platform so you can use the code freely, the developers decided to make it open source because creating tools and sharing them for everyone to use enables us all to work together and build better technology which improves the quality of life we all enjoy.
I take the same attitude when posting here, I’m making a public statement because I believe we as a society make better choices when all voices are heard and that I have something to add to the discussion - if someone wants to take an idea that I have and build in it or incorporate it into a speech they give then I’m happy about it because that’s the point of expressing an opinion, for it to spread. If someone learns from what I’m talking about then I’m happy, I don’t feel robbed or like I lost anything.
Coming on a free and open source platform then demanding ownership of your text would make even less sense than Bob Ross getting angry that people are following along with his painting tutorials. I get the sentiment and yes ai is changing the world and people will lose their jobs but it’s also bringing endless positive advancements which will improve and extend billions of lives - if datasets are locked down by oddly selfish rules like having to track down the original poster and ask for permission then only big corporation’s will be able to train LLMs and other ai thus giving them a monopoly.
Also another interesting hypocrisy that a lot of people are missing, meta might be awfull in many regards but they’re actually pretty good with open source and wrote a lot of the tools that made things like stable diffusion possible. Taking what they give then complaining when they use content posted publicly just feels so odd to me.
Just to rag on the Bob Ross metaphor, because I absolutely love him, he might not have minded if I followed along with his paintings, but he was absolutely selling some pthalo blue (which is not a bad thing its own right) and what happened to him after he died was absolutely terrible in terms of monetisation without his permission.
I guess this is all sorta tangential to the main thread here, but I think we should start seeing our information in terms of actual value, and even if we choose to contribute to an open platform like this (which I absolutely support) how much is that actually worth.
Kinda like if you work pro bono, it’s still good to keep a record of what your billable amount would have been.
Zuck and co have a vested interest in making us think that what we provide is worthless
I really am split on this, I think that modern corporate media has a big incentive to convince people that we shouldn’t participate in community projects and that working together for the betterment of all is somehow a bad thing because this is what directly affects their monopoly and control.
That said you’re right that other portions of corporate evil benefit by us thinking it has no value.
I do think we need to move away from the pushed ideal that the only benefit to work is money because that really does just benefit the rich - take Wikipedia as an example, writing pages for that isn’t going to earn me money but it allows me to live in a world where Wikipedia exists, and it’s not just me that gets to use it but everyone trying to do anything now has access to that resource which means whatever I do it’s possible that the work I put into editing articles has somehow made it a bit easier or a bit more possible.
This is even more true with open source software, it’s possible that a project I’ve done some small thing to help has grown to benefit the people making point of sale systems that allow a cafe I like to reduce costs and stay in business or maybe the veg was grown by someone that learned how from a YouTube video made using open source software…
AI is already making so many more things possible and when natural language control is better evolved it’s going to have benefits like giving every human on the planet access to world class healthcare, education and tech support, it’s going to allow anyone with an idea to make it reality and to allow open source developers to create really amazing things that we can all use.
If harvesting my throw away comments and old wiki edits can create a tool that will allow me to sit down and describe the electronics projects and coding ideas I want to make then they’re welcome to it.
Hey I just wanted to say first of all, this has been great discussion, I really appreciate it. I guess it all goes back to the original purpose of the internet, which was never meant to be turned into some heavily monetized cash cow for a handful of companies. Open source has created some amazing tools, and I’m a big fan of things like GNU and cc licenses. For me, individuals using whatever I write as a tool is no problem at all. But when it comes to a big company that just wants to scrape data for a LLM, that’s not the same.
This is wild thinking, but like say if they wanted to scrape the lemmyverse, ok, but they had to pay so we could maintain servers etc. We’d all benefit.
Yeah maybe a share-alike clause would be best, use the data if what you’re making is properly free otherwise pay
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At this point, I really don’t know. But I guess the difference is that here, or possibly other instances at least the users can have a say in it. Posting topics like this helps.
That for me feels way better than just having some company give out the terms and having us accept it whether we like it or not.
I feel like this is all still new enough to where we can shape it in a different direction than “growth at all costs”
Meta is a garabge company in so many ways. But I think that we need to allow these giant companies experience full extent of the fediverse. That will hopefully bring more pople on the fediverse, populorize is and make it more widely known / used which is a good thing. But we need to be cautious.
It won’t bring people, please read this: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
There are pros and cons on both sides of the argument. I just hope that the decision on each instance will be made in the most democratic way possible.
