This is why we can’t have nice things. It was nice to be on platforms with no corporate stink for a brief moment.
If you’re on another server, you still have that freedom. Nothing changes unless you want it to.
Well I expected this once I heard he had signed the NDA and already stopped using Mastodon, though I might look for another instance which doesn‘t federate with Meta later on.
Whatever floats their boat I guess, while I appreciate the attempt at an answer of whether they will use EEE, I don‘t think it was a satisfying answer, cause specifically others this happened to before did not end up “the same”, but worse, as users abandoned them after the bigger thing started introducing interoperability issues and features which made switching logical.
This reads as incredibly condescending, naive and duplicitous, filled with hubris.
For starters, the whole “yeah sure XMPP got EEE’d but who cares, only nerds cared about that, lol” is not only false (e.g. Jabber), but also does nothing to quell concerns.
Here’s an account by someone who was in the XMPP trenches when Google started adopting it.
Notice something? The “omg so cool!”, this is exactly the same as Rochko.
It’s the hubris when you’re a FOSS maintainer who toiled away for years without recognition and now a $700B+ corporation is flattering him by wanting to use/interact with his work.
The blog is a far cry from the anti-corporate tone in the informational video from 2018.
Then there’s the fact that Rochko is extremely tight lipped about the off the record meeting with Meta and consistently refuses to deny having received funds from Meta and refuses to pledge not to accept any funds from Meta.
There’s also the unsatisfactory answer he gave to people who started questioning some dubious sponsors and the fact that he rushed to lock the thread, killing any further discussion.
I genuinely think the dude is just so hyped for the perceived recognition, that he lost the thread.
So much so that he thinks Mastodon is untouchable.
And it’s extremely naive to think that Meta has benevolent motives here or that Mastodon will survive any schemes Meta might have.
What’s more realistic is that Mastodon will die because people will flock to Threads if their social graph has moved over.Similarly these lofty and naive ideas that people on Threads will make the switch to Mastodon once they get a taste of what it has to offer.
So now all of a sudden the “difficulty” to get started in Mastodon, that is keeping people who want a polished corporate experience away isn’t going to be an issue?
Especially when in the “extinguish” phase Meta will have siloed off from Mastodon and its portability function, having to leave their social graph behind?
It’s all so increasingly naive, one can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional sabotage at this point.
Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality.
Sure perhaps years from now a few hundred to a few thousand people might still use it, but it will be as irrelevant as XMPP is to most people, and Rochko with it.
@[email protected] in 2 years.
The whole XMPP was used by nerds thing really showed how full of hubris he is, agreed.
This is going to end in a disaster, and this blog post from him will be linked at for decades to come to try and warn the next generation the next time we need to do something like this.
And the cycle will repeat.
@[email protected] 1 year
I read your comment before I read the blog post and I have to say, I am finding it hard to align it with what’s in the blog.
Aside from the hand-waving comment about XMPP, he does a great job of explaining how everything works, and based on my understanding of the fediverse and its architecture, its all true.
I dont understand what people think should happen here. If a large corporation wants to join, then there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. Its an open protocol. If you want to use Threads, join. If you dont, don’t. If you want your server to defederate, tell your admin or join a defederated instance. If you want to federate, tell your admin or join an instance that’s federated. If you want to control your own destiny completely, self-host.
There is tons of choice here and the way it’s architected, several layers of protection. I dont get this moral panic everyone has. This is quite literally the point of a decentralized social network.
At the end of the day, if a large corporation joining the network, kills it, then it was destined to be destroyed from the beginning.
Aside from the hand-waving comment about XMPP
“Aside” is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, it reeks of a nauseating amount of hubris and makes one wonder if they’re suitable to maintain the project at all if they’re so oblivious to potential threats to the project.
I don’t understand what people think should happen here
Not roll out the red carpet for starters, and not engage with the company under NDA would be a good second.
Especially for a FOSS project that receives a healthy amount of contributions from others and likes to tout that it’s co-owned by all contributors, it could be argued that it’s highly objectionable for one person to engage, essentially as a representative, in non-transparent dealings that are sealed under NDA.
It really isn’t rocket science, here’s how the admin of the Fosstodon instance handled it.
Notice the lack of red carpet, the unwillingness to participate in an “off the record” event and the abundance of transparency towards the people he’s responsible for.I’m not saying that Rochko should’ve adopted the same abrasive “lol, get rekt” tone, its up to him if he’s comfortable with that, but the points I’m hammering on about above can be achieved in respectful manner as well.
There is tons of choice here and the way it’s architected, several layers of protection.
There is no protection. As I’ve stated in a different comment, t doesn’t take more than 2 seconds of thinking to see how empty the words are that Mastodon is not at risk.
- Threads federates with Mastodon instances
- Threads uses its massive engineering resources to implement proprietary functionality that’s incompatible with Mastodon instances
- A non-trivial number of Mastodon users jump over to Threads, this is the first wave of people that leave Mastodon
- Threads drops support for federation and silos itself off
- The majority of the remainder of people on Mastodon jump over to Threads because they want to be able to continue to interact with the people that jumped over to Threads and/or because they want to be able to continue to interact with normies now that they’re used to that
- Mastodon is effectively dead, safe for a select few that stick to their guns
3 and 5 will happen in a cascading manner, the more people switch to Threads, the more others will also want to switch.
At the end of the day, if a large corporation joining the network, kills it, then it was destined to be destroyed from the beginning.
Perhaps it is destined to be destroyed.
The concerns and ramifications of a large corporation, or any entity that vastly overshadows the “organic” Mastodon user base in orders of magnitude for that matter, federating with Mastodon have been brought up numerous times by many parties, with the goal of looking for a solutions.
These concerns weren’t only brought up in light of a possible EEE strategy that lead to the death of Mastodon, but also in light of a more Google-esque play where the market share isn’t necessarily used to outright kill, but instead to exert control1.
Every single time it fell on deaf ears (i.e. Rochko ignored it, if not outright killing the discussion), often shrugged off matter of factly that it isn’t a risk.
Also make no mistake, we’re talking about a layered issue here.
A network that can destroy Mastodon against its will due to its sheer size is bad enough.
Mastodon, by virtue of Rochko, facilitating this from within, adds an entirely new dimension to this.1 Google famously bypasses standardization bodies and simply implements their in-house developed standards, leaving other browser engines to get with the program and implement what Google wants, or become irrelevant
Its obvious you have some strong feelings about this and it sounds like they come from you wanting Mastodon and the fedivserse to thrive. I respect that. I’ve enjoyed my time here so far. It would be a shame if it got torpedo’d by a big corp (especially a shitty one like Facebook).
That said, I don’t think anyone has rolled out the red carpet. The FOSS guy’s response is great, but meeting with them cost Eugen nothing(except maybe your goodwill). The fact that there was an NDA is a nothingburger. People sign those ALL-THE-TIME. It doesn’t mean anything nefarious is happening and it doesn’t mean Eugen has “gone to the dark side”. It’s definitely not “rolling out the red carpet”.
I’ve also seen a lot of jumping to conclusions and fantastical strawmen at the bottom of everyone’s slippery slope arguments. A few of your numbered points would fall into that conclusion jumping bucket, and some of your other points are based on an, imo, misunderstanding of the users of the fediverse.
For instance, #3 and #5 don’t give this community enough credit. The bulk of the people on the fediverse are big proponents of free and open internet, privacy, foss, etc. Most are refugees of Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook to begin with–they aren’t just hopping back in bed with Facebook.
And to that point, why would they all of the sudden care about the social media all of their friends are on? I can almost guarantee that their “normie” friends aren’t on the fediverse. The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.
Like I said, I just dont get the outrage. Keep on trucking in the fediverse with the community thats here and stop spending so much time Chicken Little-ing.
edit: Oh for what its worth: https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing Thats a hilarious read about Threads and why its already pretty lame.
ts obvious you have some strong feelings about this and it sounds like they come from you wanting Mastodon and the fedivserse to thrive. I respect that. I’ve enjoyed my time here so far. It would be a shame if it got torpedo’d by a big corp (especially a shitty one like Facebook).
Of course, I wanted Mastodon and the fediverse to thrive, if only because it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to dethrone corporations that have a complete disregard of people’s wellbeing as long as it turn them a profit.
Mastodon’s figurehead in particular has squandered the opportunity and if not outright self-sabotaged himself.
My main focus thus far has been Mastodon as oppose to the fediverse as a whole, because Mastodon has a unique challenge that other fediverse projects don’t have, namely the social graph.
People visiting Lemmy don’t care and don’t know who the person above and below them is, at most they might care that they’re not straight up Nazi schmucks and preferably they’re someone who has an interest in the topic of the community they’re posting in, but that’s about it.
On a “twitterlike” the identity of the people present is of more importance. Which is why I think in particular Mastodon will suffer the most, without knowing exactly if and how the other fediverse projects will be affected by Threads.
That said, I don’t think anyone has rolled out the red carpet.
I fail to see how this is the case.
Even if we ignore everything else, ignore the severe lack of transparency from the side of Rochko, his refusal to deny that he has received funds from Meta and his refusal to pledge not to accept funds in the future, ignore what could’ve transpired during the meeting with Meta, literally pretend like we are in a vacuum and the only thing related to Meta from his hand is the blog, then the blog alone is a perfect top of the line red carpet that has been rolled out.
I mean he hails it as a victory and ends with a tacit invitation for other corporations to do the same.
Just this quote alone is enough of a red carpet being rolled out:
This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.
How much more does someone need to be inviting to be considered to have rolled out a red carpet?
I’ve also seen a lot of jumping to conclusions and fantastical strawmen at the bottom of everyone’s slippery slope arguments. A few of your numbered points would fall into that conclusion jumping bucket, and some of your other points are based on an, imo, misunderstanding of the users of the fediverse.
For instance, #3 and #5 don’t give this community enough credit. The bulk of the people on the fediverse are big proponents of free and open internet, privacy, foss, etc. Most are refugees of Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook to begin with–they aren’t just hopping back in bed with Facebook.
And to that point, why would they all of the sudden care about the social media all of their friends are on? I can almost guarantee that their “normie” friends aren’t on the fediverse. The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.
Respectfully, this is difficult to read with a straight face after having experienced first hand the effects the Threads launch have had on my Mastodon timeline.
I follow close to 2k people on Mastodon and it used to be that at any given time I could open my timeline and 400+ posts were waiting on me to peruse.
It’s completely dead now, no more than 20 or so posts showed up in total for the entire day, this after a day where there was a sea of people posting a link to their Threads profile.
Safe for a few holdouts I can count on one hand, nearly everyone created a Threads account and they’re more active there than I’ve ever seen them on Mastodon.
If anything, it seems like I gave the people on Mastodon too much credit and I’ve underestimated how strong the network effect is, since I thought it would at least take until the actual “embrace” phase of it all i.e. until Meta would be ActivityPub compatible.
And it’s not like the vast majority of people I follow are normies or anything.
About 90% of them are software engineers like myself not afraid to tinker with things and deal with the “difficulty” of making a Mastodon account.Hell, about a 100 of them run their own instance, one of which is the one I’m on and a good chunk of them are very active in the FOSS community themselves.
Sure, some of it might be because of the hype and novelty, so some might come back, but if anything that proves my point that they’ll happily jump ship if Meta does decide to nix the compatibility in the future.
And this is me being generous, like I said activity by people that moved to Threads has skyrocketed, not only did entire social graphs migrate to Threads, they were made whole again.
People that weren’t seen for ages since leaving Twitter popped up there much to many people’s delight.Most people that migrated to Mastodon wanted a 1:1 Twitter replacement first and foremost and took the ideology as a nice bonus.
These are people that built a support network on Twitter, people that built a professional network on Twitter, people that built a network of peers, in short, a network that was important if not essential to them.
If I take myself as an example, an indie iOS dev, before I left Twitter I used it to stay in touch with friends I had in my industry, other indie devs, engineers at Apple, journalists covering and reviewing apps, local organizations and affiliated people working towards social justice, national organizations and affiliated people working towards social justice and then the rest was purely to ingest information and news.
The purpose of being in touch with these people varied, from comparing notes on how to best do my work, socializing with friends, arranging collaborations on projects, keeping track of what others were working on, promoting my own work, getting help from Apple engineers when I hit a snag, helping people get a job at places that were looking for someone, staying in the loop in case I wanted/needed a job, staying in the loop about local organizing and coordinating with organizers, etc. etc.
I was lucky that I happened to work in a field that is tech savvy and so most of my social graph, but not all, transitioned to Mastodon.
Many people weren’t this lucky and even the people in my social graph that transitioned had a considerable chunk of people that wasn’t entirely enamored by Mastodon.
Personally I welcomed the change of pace, but I couldn’t deny that their gripes were valid.So to circle back to your comments about the core crowd and the crowd that Threads attracts:
The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.
Unless you by “core crowd” you refer to what Rochko called “nerd circles”, then I’m afraid you’re wrong on this.
Just as you’re wrong on the crowd that Threads attracts, because not only “were” they coming on Mastodon, they literally were on Mastodon until recently.Somehow this statement by Rochko is now even more laughable in hindsight:
Well, 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.
Not only was Mastodon already heavily slanted towards “nerd circles” at the time these words were published, but it will only become more of a “nerd circle” from here on out.
ActivityPub hasn’t even been enabled on Threads and Mastodon isn’t “where we are now”.edit: Oh for what its worth: https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing Thats a hilarious read about Threads and why its already pretty lame.
While a funny writing style, it comes across as uninformed.
As much as I wish it was the shitshow as depicted in that blog post, I’m sad to say that those were for all intents and purposes just placeholder posts, as soon as you start following people you won’t really see those anymore.
Call it Chicken Little-ing, call it FUD, call it whatever you want.
My timeline is dead and pretty much my social graph is happy they’ve found their precious Twitter replacement, so other than a very niche group, I’d say Mastodon is dead.
I might not like it, but I’m not gonna pretend like the blog you linked is based in reality while I stare out the window at the cool kids having fun like I’m Squidward
I disagree with your threat assessment, but thanks for that link, it was indeed a good read.
The sanest comment here.
The problems I personally have with Meta are:
- Data scraping Meta is an ad company and tries to collect as much data from anyone. They are known to make shadow graphs of people not even in their network to try and know as much about as many people possible. This is their business model so they will do it to the fedi.
- Moneyed interests They are going to compensate instances that federate with them, which turns people that run instances from volunteers into business owners. From there they can try and dilute admins further into showing ads etc.
- Sucking users from the fediverse They will make it easy to get in (import with history when mastodon does not support it), hard to get out (if you go, you can’t take your posts) and will hold your connections hostage against you (we will stop fedarating with the other instances now, so if you want to connect to your friends you have to have a threads account, sorry not sorry).
That and basically all the shit big corps do like make people angry and hacking people’s brains to stay on the site for as long as fucking possible. Which they are 100% going to try to do here regardless of our intentions.
They can, and are probably already doing, #1 right now. As are Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Apple, DuckDuck, OpenAi, etc. All of the comments and profiles are public information which means literally anyone on the web can see it and do <insert nefarious or not nefarious thing here> with it. As the blog post says, they don’t get anything else though like IP or email–only your home instance gets that. Everything else they can already get with their webcrawlers.
#2. There is no evidence that they plan on doing that. This is a slippery slope argument (which is a logical fallacy). And so what if they do that? Don’t join that instance. Migrate to a different instance. Ruud could add ads to lemmy.world today.
#3. Then let those users go. How does that impact you or the fediverse? Are all of your friends on Mastodon or Lemmy now? I seriously doubt it. Do they all need to be? If people leave to go to Threads…then what? They could go to Tildes, Bluesky, or any other service right now. If the service is more appealing and aligns with their values then they’ll leave for it (or join it as well). Who cares? The value proposition of the fediverse is that no one entity controls it and you have nearly infinite choice to do whatever the hell you want. Threads may never federate at all. Part of me wonders why they would. Why would they care about the 12M people on mastodon right now vs the 2.3 BILLION instagram users? If they convert 10% of those into Threads users, they’ll dwarf Mastodon, so what incentive would they have to federate? It seems like it would be more of a headache for them than a benefit.
You can tilt at every windmill you see or you can enjoy the fediverse and make it a place you and your friends want to spend time.
Can’t make money with the information that is public, they need the social connections to people that will see ads. They want to know our interests, and the interests of all the people we interact with. They don’t give a duck about IPs or emails, they can’t monetize those. So they will keep databases on all users and their connections and their interests all so they can show more appropriate ads. If they’re on the connected fediverse they’ll keep all that too, just in case. And any government can get this info if they ask for it.
#2 there is evidence of them wanting to do that. I’ll look up the thread on mastodon later (I’m on mobile rn).
#3 is a difficult one. I really don’t know why they even want this. I suspected it was to get active users on their initial timeline, but I guess that wasn’t that important to them after all. But there is a real chance of them stopping the growth of the fediverse or even minimizing the size and influence, simply to remove a competitor. Everything is better to them than having users calm down in a relaxing social media environment that is non toxic and could make them all obsolete and kill the whole social media industry’s MO
Ultimately the fediverse is still an experiment. It clearly works, and in isolation many of the services (Lemmy, Matrix, etc.) work well enough on their own.
I’m not optimistic about anything at this point. The fediverse might die; it might not.
There could be huge incentives for them to convert Mastodon users over to Threads, based on their internal analytics, in which case the headache would be worth it.
Meta won’t be dead anytime soon, but it’s clear that they’ve made some risky plays, which means their decisions are going to continuously be less risky.
couldn’t they data scrape without creating a new social network platform
Far too many people in this thread seem to not understand that everything they post here is on the open, public internet, and it’s infuriating.
The data is already public. The cat pictures are already public. Those pictures of food you posted on Instagram are public. All of those posts you put on Facebook with your real name and political beliefs and pictures of your family and social security number are public.
It’s only not public if you choose to lock it down with permissions, but all that does is make it public to the corporation you don’t trust. The Fediverse doesn’t have that feature because they already know it’s fucking pointless. Everything is a third-party server and nobody should trust any of the servers they post on.
If you don’t want it to be public, don’t post the message!
Excellent post, and it is truly heartbreaking stuff. We know Eugen signed an NDA with Meta which just seals the deal for me given the other refusals to answer basic questions. I think he is probably a person who is finding validation for something he’s worked on for a very long time, and Meta is blinding him. But that’s what they do. They are emotional manipulators by trade.
Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality
This is exactly what happened with RCS. Sure, it is an open standard. But Google EEE’d it by adding proprietary functionality using their near unlimited budget and influence, then built it all around their own proprietary middleware, like Jive, to lock out others. Some of the most popular messaging apps, including Signal, had been begging Google for RCS access for years. Google refuses, because they firmly control it now. Only a handful of partners get to access the supposedly “open” standard which Google has co-opted. Sure, you could pour resources into the old, unmaintained RCS standard from over a decade ago. Before Google essentially killed it by moving proprietary and snuffing it out. But then it wouldn’t work with Google’s RCS, and Google’s RCS is what people know as RCS at this point.
Meta will do the same thing with ActivityPub specifically, and decentralized social media in general. They will EEE their way to the finish line. They will wall it all off and prevent account portability and cross-communication outside of a preferred partner network. I could see them walling it off to the Meta-owned properties as they seek ways to further tie Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp together under a common protocol which they’ve EEE’d.
They are emotional manipulators by trade.
You could say this about literally any big tech company.
Ultimately it’s up for humanity to decide what it values most.
A lot of people are sick of BT, but so many are locked into their services and they don’t have much capacity to change at the moment, so until that infrastructure for switching evolves it’s going to be a while before anything really changes.
It’s just as likely though that there are enough people who are indifferent too, which then implies that BT has a higher likelihood of doing what it does.
Too much is happening right now for any real projection to be made. Best we let this settle for a minute.
Only a handful of partners get to access the supposedly “open” standard which Google has co-opted.
This is why God invented GPL. With GPL, you don’t get to do that.
For example, right now, IBM is in the process of learning very hard lessons why they don’t get to do that.
Could you explain more about IBM? I’m not as tech literate and I’ve been barely keeping up with the conversations about federation and EEE, what’s going on with IBM?
IBM bought RedHat, and recently decided to take ther code repos for RedHat Enterprise Linux semiprivate. They still have to offer the source code to people they give the compiled product to, but they don’t have to give it publically, even though it is open source. Their claim is that they didn’t like others profiting off their work by rebuilding the source an selling it. Of course RedHat seems to now be ignoring the rather large amount of open source code they didn’t write that they are selling, like the Linux kernel.
Yup, and very little people realize that almost all RCS implementations are by Google (often via their Jibe service).
I had heard, of course, that Rochko was in confidential talks with Facebook abiut something. This is disheartening. Facebook is toxic and must be kept out of the Fediverse.
Confidential is something which is not meant to be disclosed, but people gossiping call anything as such that has not been yet divulged to the public.
Partially correct. Your point?
Interesting times, we have Elon destroying the user base in twitter, sending users to the fediverse (add in reddit), whilst his mate Mark launches Threads and starts courting the fediverse. They’re two billionaires. They both have the same vision. Monopolised control. One destroys whilst the other builds. They’re in this together. Don’t be so blind. De-federate!
Question if a server defederate from threads but is still federated with a server that federate with threads can meta get your data
Meta can get your data in any case. ActivityPub is inherently public. You should assume anything you post on Mastodon, Lemmy, or KBin is public.
It was right there in the name all along!
I’m a lot more optimistic (aka naive) than most it seems.
I’m really new to all this fediverse stuff, but I believe we can’t lose what we already have, people that are here before Threads, will probably be here after Threads, since we already made that decision to leave reddit or twitter, to leave all that behind is a big social sacrifice.
My red line for Threads will be if they start to mess with the standards and the ActivityPub protocol, acting in bad faith.
People can and will be willing to go back to the corporate side if their service are perceived to be better. Reminder, Reddit wasnt in this situation for years, carried by decades of unpaid volunteer work, it is only when they pushed the line too hard that we moved to other alternative, despite being the same company as they ever: profit first, user second. If Meta could pull off a better service, and looking at the money at their disposal, its highly likely, it wont be far fetched to predict users would move to Threads for better integration, and leave other servers years behind, and when Threads makes the move to extinguish, our community would have been too far behind to ever recover our stand.
It wont be the first, or even second time it happened. IE did it, Microsoft Office did it, Chrome did it (to a lesser extent), by this point, we should be suspicious of any move by big corps, just by the sheer ease of them pulling it off.
I think this is reasonable.
It would be interesting to know what Meta told them.
I imagine they’ve used a FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) strategy to paint themselves in a good light and being without them in dark clouds.
If I had to guess the Zuck to him with their powers combined they could kill Twitter. I can see the concern after what happened with XMPP but a social media site like mastadon doesn’t need to communicate with other sites. Mastadon can just defedirate with threads if they don’t like something that they do. I mean lemmy and mastadon don’t really communicate together very often and exist on their own.
We kept losing, and will keep losing, because billionaire megacorps simply have the money to move worlds if doing so aligns with their ‘interests’ (ie money). This hasn’t changed, and won’t change now either; the Fediverse is done for.
Fuck Facebook for ruining another good thing.
Enjoy it while it lasts, and don’t get too attached.
It’s an inevitable aspect of what happens when the Internet is commercialized.
Something something French Revolution
ActivityPub won’t ever “truly” die, it might lose the chance of becoming “the salvation from mega corporations running the internet” though. We’ll always have the possibility of running small-ish, tight-knit instances.
But agreed, fuck Zuckerberg and his cronies.
I don’t think it was ever going to be the salvation from mega corporations. The internet itself was touted as that, but corporations figured out how to capture and own most of it. No reason they wouldn’t do the same thing for ActivityPub if it became as common place as the Internet itself.
Yup, capitalism pushes them to try to own/incorporate everything that can either be a threat or a resource for the business.
Damn you’re depressing
There’s a long term silver lining though. People keep learning. Constant exposure to manipulation makes us more resistent to it. Consider how much the Internet has trained you to recognize scammers, salesmen, trolls, instigators, demagogues and so on.
When people like Zucc get involved in anything and the appropriate amount of skepticism isn’t shown, you’re left with little reason to be optimistic.
I say we counter EEE with FFF: deFedereate, Forget, Fuck 'em.
I can see the argument that Meta wants to kill the fediverse but I am kinda excited that we could possibly still get content from feeds that would not consider a mastodon account, even if that is a disagreeable attitude. Looking at Threads it already looks like brands “autosport, financial times” etc have setup regular posting schedules on threads so it really could be the Twitter killer.
Rochko has demonstrated to be either foolish or naive, and both are bad.
I’m not betting on him to having been bought, out of a minimum of trust, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the case.
Mets is not different than any other person entering the fediverse. They are ultimately a company and will do what they need to be profitable. Ultimately they advertise social connection, and that’s their business model.
Why is everyone acting like meta is different than anyone else, they’re not special.
I see meta no different than the company behind mastodon
Because decentralized social networks don’t need to be profitable. That’s the whole point of this. Spread out, smaller instances, there is absolutely no need to for an instance to become so massive that it requires profitability to continue.
XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.’
Is he foolish? I can’t tell, mastodon is massive. Look at mastodon.social, there’s already plenty of people here.’
I agree with him completely, why are people so he’ll bent on fear mongering this? The worst possible outcome is that the fedi will… be exactly the same as it is now lol.
Meta doesn’t care about the Fedi population, they’re not even 1% of their userbase, and they know that the fedi crowd is one of the most anti people of their network.
There is no embrace-extend-extinguish. If Meta starts to change up the ActivityPub protocol and then make it proprietary, then networks like Lemmy and Mastodon will just stay on the original one. They can’t force the fedi to follow, and they know this.
They can’t inject ads or data scrape more then they already can. Your public info is already public, which can be assumed that it can and is being scraped. This exact comment is one of them. They can scrape your info the exact same as they can now.
This will introduce more people to the concept of the fedi and they’ll be more willing to migrate to other platforms like Mastodon/Lemmy when they understand the concept better. This is only a good thing for the population, and we won’t lose any to the new network as stated before.
So at that point, what is a single downside of this? You can even just instance block them if you still dont like it, so it won’t even affect you then.
Fediverse will even be broken, just as we are now arguing about what will or will not happen. Fedi will not be the same. What will remain are broken pieces of it.
The size difference between Meta and Mastodon isn’t even funny. Mastodon is basically a rounding error.
But even if Meta wouldn’t even represent a significant proportion of the fediverse’s user base, their presence could influence the development and evolution of ActivityPub and the network. Meta’s financial resources and influence could drive changes that a smaller, independent network like the Fediverse might disagree with but have little power to resist.
How would the fedi not have the power to resist? People will just create forks removing unwanted changes. Given the grassroots nature of the fedi, I can bet there’s a ton of people willing and qualified to do so. Meta can’t do anything to the fedi, we’re already independent and fully functional without their involvement so we have zero reliance on them. I don’t see how we’d ever have to rely on them.
We don’t have to rely on them. They initially support open standards, extend those standards with proprietary features, then use those features to outcompete smaller rivals. You can’t deny that this would be in their interest. You can’t deny that Meta is known for anti-competitive behavior. Why trust them blindly, just because they do something which looks like they have (or act on) the same values than you?
Out compete with whom? Mastodon is not their rival. Our population is non existent to theirs and is completely irrelevant. They already have a locked down protocol that we can’t interact with. I cannot stress this enough: they give zero fucks about the fedi population, and they have nothing to gain from attempting to absorb and extremely small community compared to theirs. Also literally the most resilient community out there.
So I ask again, who are they competing with? They have nothing to gain from us.
They don’t need to absorb it. They just have to prevent it from growing as fast. The Fediverse grew orders if magnitude over the last month. If this continues, everything will be the Fediverse. Meta obviously doesn’t want that and Threads is a panicked attempt to “nip it in the bud”.
If that was the case, then they’d go for Bluesky which will inevitably grow significantly bigger.
Could be. Perhaps the developers of Bluesky realized the dangers of letting them in and showed them the door early. Perhaps it’s still to small to take seriously. Who knows.
What we do know though is that the Fediverse grew over leaps and bounds recently and is thus very much on their radar. That’s a bad place to be.
Of course it’s a shit product name that uses a generic commonly used term. :/
Can someone explain to me why people are so violently opposed to this?
If Threads blows up, and ActivityPub is integrated, you’ll have access to all of it through any federated instance. No need to let Meta sap all your data to view it or communicate with it’s users. Meta can’t kill ActivityPub or force us onto Threads, just abandon it and leave us back where we are today. If you don’t like the Meta users, just make or join an instance that isn’t federated.
Anyone can scrape the metaverse data and use it for whatever, Meta included. Them implementing ActivityPub doesn’t change anything about that.
Look I don’t like Meta as much as the next guy, but this all just seems like illogical gatekeeping
Edit: I understand now, see: XMPP and Google. Good article someone replied to me with, down below.
Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. Big corporations want mainly one thing: gobble up as much value exclusively to themselves. They will take whatever means necessary to get there. The strategies to privatize public resources (XMPP, ActivityPub, etc.) are known. They look great for the public on the outside, but over the years will erode the value for everybody BUT them. In order to not let it get as far, many (including me) are of the conviction to not even give them a finger, let alone the whole hand.
not even give them a finger
i’m willing to give them the “finger”
🖕=👍
Still don’t get how their do that while there is already a big coperate backing with mastodon gbmh.
It’s only been a few hours and they already have more users than the entire Fediverse did during its peak by yesterday after all of this recent drama. We are already fucked, I salute every one of you as the fediverse sinks.
Oh really?
Step 1: Threads starts federating with mastodon
Step 2: mastodon users happily engage with threads, letting it become the biggest fediverse instance
Step 3: threads stops federating with mastodon
Step 4: mastodon users switch over to threads where all conversation is happening, leaving the fediverse deserted
Plus this isn’t like its XMPP or something where people actaully care who they’re talking to. I really don’t.
Plus if all a lot of people who you follow are on threads then it might be a more attractive option to just switch platforms so you can see their content again after meta defederates
Mastodon.social is the biggest instance
There’s plenty of conversation already existing. Even my single user instance is barely keeping up.
Its not like this is how federation works, federation happens in 3 ways: a person follows a user, thus getting their posts, an instance follows a relay, which gets sent posts and spreads them back out like a vaccum, and 3rd boosting posts.
I don’t see threads changing all that much if people don’t follow those accounts, and or meta doesn’t follow relays and send their posts out through relays.
I can’t figure out what meta wants to actaully do.
I can’t decipher fully.
If your a big instance and don’t want to waste bandwidth, just block them.
If you want meta, block them from the federated timeline if you desire.
No one will guide you in what to do with your fedi instance.
Plus knowing meta, they’ll problary select a handful of instances to federate with. Meaning this plan is stupid.
I’ve spent way too long thinking about this.
I also might be underestimating people’s ability to actaully use a platform. Idk
But Mastodon has less users than Threads already, if someone wanted to jump ship for more conversation wouldn’t they do it already? Heck, wouldn’t they have stayed on twitter?
More than 5 million people signed up within hours, let’s assume they will have 30 million users by the end of the month. I’m sure there are Mastodon users will consider switching to Threads.
https://www.marketing-interactive.com/meta-threads-garners-5-million-signups-in-first-few-hours
And not to mention the Threads app is a privacy nightmare. I’m sure they can figure out any fediverse user, If fediverse server remains federated with meta server.
One more thing, this mastodon server admin declined an invitation from meta
51 million already
It’s already happened in the past, it will happen in the future.
Do you remember what happened with gtalk and facebook messenger? They both were based on xmpp. After moving away from xmpp (what both did), I didnt have use for xmpp anymore. Honestly, Meta has given me no reason whatsoever in their whole record of existence to earn my trust.
People are mainly afraid of EEE (Extend, Embrace, Extinguish) playing out agian.
I guess the fear (and probable strategy for Meta) is to first establish themselves as just a reliable instance with a closed app (Threads). From there, it’s a slow crawl to bring in the users, from outside but also from other instances. They have multiple tools for this: the infinite budget to develop Threads with exclusive features, just a better app, maybe influencer friendly ad models. The list is infinite.
So where’s the rub? Meta is just introducing activity pub to more users.
The problem is two step: They’ll eventually will lock in the platform from rest of the fediverse. It’ll might be years from now but it’ll happen (unless it’s killed first if course). This hurts rest of the fediverse by making it smaller: They will hook in users that would’ve otherwise chosen another instance and now are in Meta’s side fence which has turned into a wall.
Note: Not an expert, I just like to speculate.
Because history shows big tech companies fuck over competition and that competition is us, regular people.
We’ve gone from not interacting with them to now being their rival and a direct threat to their profits.
This article sums it up very well: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
A monopolistic corporation joining a free (not gratis, free as in free software) network is always a hostile takeover.
I hate this article since it compares to XMPP. A much more accurate comparison would be seething like E-mail, I believe.
I get it… I’m likely going to block meta instances from the servers I have whenever I have time to figure out how to.
How is the comparison to XMPP lacking?
Anyways, the same thing is starting to happen to E-Mail as well: http://www.igregious.com/2023/03/gmail-is-breaking-email.html?m=1
not suprised, E-mail has been on that downward spiral for a while. The only thing keeping that alive is many independent E-mail servers.
I don’t see threads providing any value
That was a good read, totally changed my position. Thank you.
Would you consider editing your original post to reflect that :)
I think what people don’t want is the audience and culture that Threads is likely to bring to the fediverse, not so much Meta itself.
The audience is not the problem. Meta’s mere presence on the network will be. We are now at a critical point in the struggle to survive as a network, and it’s not looking good.
If we continue like today, the network effect (Google it) would eventually lead to ActivityPub being the de facto too-big-to-fail standard in all of the web. We aren’t there yet, though. Meta knows this too and doesn’t want it to happen, because extracting value from a diverse network is way harder than from a centralized user base. The fact that they even want to federate in the first place (shouldn’t be in their interest!) rings alarm bells.
So what do you suggest? Mass defederation from them?
Honestly, there isn’t much else we can do. Spread the word that there are better alternatives to Threads and don’t let them join us. If you prevent “If you can’t beat them, join them.” then that’s a step in the right direction (survival of the network).
I agree. There’s absolutely no way Meta is a good faith actor in this situation (based on, well, everything they’ve ever done up to this point) and if we give them an inch they’ll take the whole thing.
The only thing to be done is an immediate, full−scale shunning by as many communities as possible. Make it abundantly clear that they’re not welcome here, and they can go lie in the cesspool they already made of traditional social media.
