How can anyone trust Facebook over this? I just don’t understand.
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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!
LMAO, i didnt knew that its not in the eu already… Oh wait the data privacy law is something here.
Threads will just straight up kill the fideverse. Ping me in a year or so!
Honestly doubt that threads will kill anything.
I would not take that risk. If it kills it. It happens fast
I say we counter EEE with FFF: deFedereate, Forget, Fuck 'em.
Defederate. Meta would do nothing but rot the fediverse from the inside
The instance I’m on already took that step, and I was thrilled to see it.
Can someone ELI5 what this means for Lemmy, Mastadon, and other platforms that are federated?
I thought the point of federations was to allow server instances the ability to prevent other instances from interacting with one another?
Couldnt servers just block or prevent Threads from interacting with them?
Just reading this? I don’t understand how this truly changes anything at all. Why is everyone concerned? The API isn’t owned by Zuck but open for usage.
The fear is a practice called “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” (or EEE). It’s been used by tech companies before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
It, in theory, could work like this:
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Meta embraces ActivityPub in its tech in an attempt to garner good will and make it easy for users to transition to Threads.
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Meta extends on ActivityPub by saying "oh we’re just adding a few things that make this better for our users (on our service) but we’re still supporting ActivityPub!
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Meta then extinguishes ActivityPub support, and severally hobbles AP, after they secure enough users to be happy and think AP offers no real competition anymore.
Then the enshittification process begins, by moving the focus from users to other interests (usually advertisers) at the expense of users. And eventually to the platform owners, at the expense of advertisers. Though I guess they’ll skip the middle step, being a public company?
So after they build good will in the community and get a large userbase on their platform you think they will then pull the rug right out from under their own feet? Why would they cripple AP if their app is running on it?
It’s not that they would necessarily cripple it, but they would “enhance” their instance of AP (the “extend” in EEE), “accidentally” making it incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse and thus creating an excuse to suddenly drop support for the Fediverse. At this point users in, say, Mastodon will have created some degree of dependency on users in Threads, and at that point people in there would be forced to move to Threads if they want to maintain a similar experience as before.
Sounds like people should be more concerned about just not using Threads.
ActivityPub is a communication protocol. There’s nothing stopping anyone from implementing it and then adding their own ‘features’.
Just look at how different companies have implemented the HTML ‘standard’. You end up with websites that require specific browsers to run properly. It’s gotten better over the past few years, but god damn anyone old enough to remember what a pain it was designing websites in the 90’s and working around all of Internet Explorer’s shenanigans will tell you it’s not a good time.
They replace AP with something else internally and abandon AP. If anyone wants to keep talking to them, they’ve got to hop onboard whatever they’ve replaced AP with. This effectively kills AP (theoretically).
Why would it kill AP if there is a set of users that don’t care about those features but just their privacy?
Just don’t use Meta’s app or switch. I just don’t understand personally how this removed every other server instance using AP out of the equation if FB would just be closing themselves off even if they did build something better or useful.
We need to remember that ActivityPub and this entire fediverse is only to allow small, individual communities to live without a major corporation able to pull the plug. It’s not privacy centric at all. In fact, quite far from it.
I don’t understand that either? I thought the Fediverse was privacy first driven? I don’t really understand how it couldn’t be when you can wall off Threads if you choose to do so?
AP is just a networking protocol for communication between several servers. You should assume everything you to is 1000% public and easily gathered by everyone that wants to
Actually, apps don’t “run on” AP. AP is a federation/communication protocol, it’s only used to communicate objects, or things about objects, to other servers. Every app that uses AP can basically still work without it, since it has its own data structures and UI.
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Yes they can block threads, but they have to choose to. So some people might be on servers whose operators don’t block it. And, well, some people might actually want it. I see a lot of Mastodon accounts moving instances in the future.
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!
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.
FOSS is the ultimate form of software. It’s like life, it will just get copied and forked and modified, and it will continue to evolve because it’s been set free in the world.
Yeah, Facebook might embrace-extend-extinguish the Fediverse. But on the other hand, it’s not the end of the world if they do. Right now, we have a decentralized platform to post, talk and interact on. If that changes, we will create another one
To me, the most interesting part about this is that the Fediverse is even on
Facebook’sMeta’s radar. It’s tiny. Do they see it as a possible competitor?They see it as free data. Meta will always suck data wherever they can. Remember they have a LLM engine too and lots of money and lots of data to train it on – but more’s even better. They can have swarms of bots trained to spread whatever the highest bidder wants them to spread. They can PR whitewash a brand or a celebrity, they can twist events, they can influence elections.
They probably don’t need to make a whole platform to do this, though. Couldn’t they just slurp the data right out of ActivityPub without making Threads? Either way, I’m dismayed that meta is managing to YET AGAIN convince people that this time they’ll be good
Facebook never operated misleading bots. Companies that ran those bots utilized Facebook as their delivery method.
It was free data to begin with. It’s always been free data. All those internet posts you posted from some lame message board 25 years ago are still there. It’s probably still on Archive.org.
If you’re concerned about your privacy, don’t post shit you don’t want out there on a public forum.
I think it could be a way to get around privacy laws.
Those laws quickly becomes difficult to apply when everyones posts are no longer on central servers owned by meta and instead is copied across thousands of instance owners.
But I think their primary objective is to take on Twitter and get people to use Meta instead. It doesn’t cost them much to start experimenting with the tech, and being first somewhere is always an advantage.
It’s all fun and games until Facebook starts adding features, then eventually starts defining what the fediverse should do to maintain federation with Facebook.
Welcome to FOSS software. It’s constantly evolving and forking itself. If Facebook wanted to fork ActivityPub RIGHT NOW, they could.
How would that impact your life at all? You could stay using lemmy and mastodon like you have been.
This is my biggest fear. The hidden weakness of the fediverse is that the largest implementation gets to set the rules of federation
I disagree. Mastodon does not “set the rules” for federation of Kbin, Lemmy, Funkwhale, BookWyrm, Pixelfed, Peertube, or any other platform in the Fediverse. The platforms are interoperable when it makes sense, but they are designed to fill different needs and it makes no sense for them to follow some centralized “rules of federation”.
Embrance, Extend, Extinguish. Enshittification. Call it what you will, but i don’t think this will end well for us.
I think meta just wants to captailize on twitters demise.
I don’t see how crushing activtypub would help them in anyway.
Mastodon is already massive and many companies (and the EU) have their own instance.
Meta gets paid a fortune to spread disinformation. That’s why they’re doing this.
That is a very real thing they do. I like this reasoning
You don’t see how crushing their competition would help them?
Activity pub is more than just mastodon, there is book ratings, and also peertube.
I don’t see meta ever going there.
I don’t see meta ever going there.
out of the goodness of their collective hearts? They already sell books (through ads) and host video, why do you think they’d stop after only crushing federalized social media? Because they can’t be bothered?
No I just don’t see meta wanting to compete in those fields
No? Up until very recently, Mastodon essentially was the Fediverse, and it was laughably tiny compared to Meta. It cracked 2.5 million active monthly users in January, which sounds like a lot until you realize Instagram has 2 billion active monthly users. More importantly, the active user count for the whole Fediverse was in decline since that January number, down to 1.4 million monthly users at the start of June. The Reddit drama drove an increase in users, but no way Meta is agile enough to shove this out the door in response to something that recent. Its not like Mastodon has a glowing public perception outside of the Fediverse, either.
Truthfully, I don’t think Meta gives a damn about the current Fediverse; it’s too small to matter. Whatever their goal, I don’t think we were a consideration.
Meta needs to be split up at this point, as do many other tech companies.
The problem with trying to break it up is that the FTC already allowed the mergers that let them get so big. They approved the purchases of Whatsapp and Instagram. Thankfully the new chair of the FTC seems to understand letting companies get this big is not good and is trying to block these things from happening in the future.
Yes, once a company is a certain size it has too much power to exploit and do a crappy job of customer service while they do it.
What we know
Threads is a separate app from Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. This means Threads’ user base will be separate from their existing platforms.
Well that aged like milk…
Aged? The article is recent.
It is a pretty dumb comparison, though. Dude should have done his homework.
Which corroborates Eugen either being really damn naive or a paid shill.
@[email protected] in 3 years
@InfiniWheel @brave_lemmywinks (dev here) we currently do not support setting reminders that last for years 😀
For me, I don’t need new fancy features to communicate. I don’t need video chat rooms. I don’t need constant notifications. I just need a simple place to post my social expressions and read other people’s social expressions. I don’t want my experience to be shaped by algorithms designed to keep me engaged and present. For me, social media is like going down to the pub and talking with some regular friends. The BIGGER a platform is, the less it’s about being social, and it’s more about promotion. Promotion of self, events, clubs, companies, etc.
Threads will take away people from Mastodon, but that’s a good thing. Because it will appeal to people who desire a different social media experience. They can take the foam off the top, leaving us with a smaller group that prefers a simpler, less invasive, social media. I don’t have to share all my contacts, my browsing history, my health data or my financial data to Mastodon (or any service in the Fediverse) in order to use it. You cannot say the same about Thread.
I will always side with something like Mastodon over Thread. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe Mastodon cannot fail. It certainly can. But it won’t be Thread that kills it.
My problem is a smaller Lemmy/Mastodon/fediverse means no niche communities. For example, I want to chat about all the individual specific video games I’ve played and I can’t reasonably do that if there aren’t sufficient people on Lemmy to do that with.
As for integration vs no integration with corporation’s bittersweet pill I don’t know my stance in that case. I seem to be getting conflicting information on how healthy this would be for the fediverse. Whatever gets me my niche topic chats, in a solid and usable UI, while avoiding corporate data harvesting, advertising, and political manipulation is what I want.
