I don’t understand what Meta will gain from participating in the fediverse? Their ultimate goal is to make money of Threads and I just don’t see how encouraging an open federation will help them do it? Even 3Eing the fediverse will not do them much good as they already have sooo much traffic already that killing the fediverse will not make a serious change in their figures. But OTOH it does seem like Threads is net positive for the fediverse ATM. Even if all current denizens of the fediverse will block Threads, there is a large group of people that are exposed to the concept of “fediverse” for the fist time and some of them will want to learn more. This is a good thing. Anyway, I don’t know why they are doing it, but I’m cautiously glad they did it. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
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I do not know their intentions or the implication, however I feel justified in feeling threatened by this.
I am sure they want the content we create. And I would bet that their side would have ads for money and profit.
Threads allows Meta to start a site they can monetize that’s already full of content, without having to make the effort of getting people to create any of it. They also get to monetize content that’s not even created on their own site.
There are probably several reasons, many not entirely clear to any one of us now, but one can guess.
I think not an insignificant reason for this is the coming expansion of the EU Digital Markets Act where Meta among a few other tech giants are labeled as gatekeepers. As always, while the EU might be one of the earlier ones, other markets will likely follow in the coming decade.
Meta will going forward be forced to open up their platforms and incorporate interoperability with other services. It starts with messages, but knowing the EU, that is probably just the first stepping stone.
If Meta have to do it anyways, they will probably want to make sure that they are the first one in establish a strong presence in the technology that every other tech giant will also need to embrace.
I don’t think they care even a little about the present Fediverse community, what they do care about is the technology that Apple, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and so on will agree on to use going forward. By embracing ActivityPub early, they are betting on having already a strong position when these companies are inevitably going to have to try to agree on a common standard.
I think they’re trying to get people off Fedi and into Threads.
I would bet 100 dollars they want in on the Fediverse because they want to extinguish a competitor. They did it with Instagram and Whatsapp. They’ll do it again.
The fediverse isn’t a competitor. It’s not even a blip on their radar for competition.
its like when AOL opened up its email and chat service to anyone though i expect with learnings on why that didn’t work.
Yeah that’s a possibility. They could do something like “ohh too bad Killer Feature X is looking so badly on Mastodon. On Threads it will look so much better”. Essentially using fedi as a crappy demo for Threads. That sounds like a typical business plan to me.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It’s the old Microsoft playbook that Google is trying to pull with Chrome.
@jcrabapple @ComptitiveSubset EEE. Embrace, extend and extinguish.
Lol not gonna work
“Mastodon is so hard to understand, at least Threads is easy.”
Once people start saying that Meta will be in charge of the fediverse.
The fediverse is and always will be more than microblogging instances like Threads and Mastodon.
Exactly. Ease of use can truly impact the growth of a platform.
Like, I’m sure most people on Lemmy are a bit tech savvy, but the overall user just want to make 1 account and be able to access everything.
Right now, Threads is doing a “good” job by integrating themselves with Instagram. Don’t even need to create a new account if you have Insta, just pop in and start using it.
If the fediverse wants to retain its independence from Meta, the content producers of significance need to be convinced of the value of being in control of their brand while still having access to the user base of Threads. If the content producers go to Threads, the fediverse becomes irrelevant.
I don’t know, aren’t most of the citizens of the fediverse here because we are abandoning the large, profit-driven social media companies? It seems like it’s more of an invasion than persuasion - they want access to what we have, and since the AP is open, they can get access to it (mostly Mastodon, but also the content we have on the wider fediverse as well).
All 35 of us :d
I think people around here have a vastly overestimated opinion of how important the fediverse is to other social media sites.
Within the first 7 hours of Threads, they had 10 million users.
Meta absolutely DGAF about us. They don’t have to. Using ActivityPub is at worst an anti-monopoly play. But by the time they turn on federation, all of the people who were going to leave the fediverse for Threads will likely already have done so.
Meta wouldn’t have a plan to federate in the future if they didn’t have an end goal of taking advantage of the federation.
This is what people aren’t getting. The fediverse, as it is now, is irrelevant to Meta’s plans for Threads. Meta views the fediverse as an inducement to get creators to join Threads. Per The Verge:
As Mosseri puts it, this is a move designed to appease creators who have grown increasingly wary of relying on the whims of centralized social media companies. “I think we might be a more compelling platform for creators, particularly for the newer creators who are more and more savvy, if we are a place where you don’t have to feel like you have to trust us forever,” he says.
They’re trying to “embrace, extend, extinguish.” Federated social media is an existential threat to them, so they’re trying to absorb it before it has the chance to gain momentum.
They participate because the Digital Markets Act is forcing them to: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en
Examples of the “do’s” - Gatekeeper platforms will have to:
- allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations
- allow their business users to access the data that they generate in their use of the gatekeeper’s platform
- provide companies advertising on their platform with the tools and information necessary for advertisers and publishers to carry out their own independent verification of their advertisements hosted by the gatekeeper
- allow their business users to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the gatekeeper’s platform
The interoperability is the big one. The Fediverse gives a way for Meta to be in compliance, and they have an interest in maintaining competition.
My opinion is it’s just the data, Meta is all about collecting data. Being part of the fediverse means they potentially get access to a bunch of data through scraping and user interactions.
For example someone might not follow a gardening account on instagram/Facebook but they might join a gardening community. That’s valuable data.
They can also boast about the new technology. Maybe they hope it will revive the meta verse lol
My opinion is it’s just the data, Meta is all about collecting data. Being part of the fediverse means they potentially get access to a bunch of data through scraping and user interactions.
You’re absolutely right! Just take a look at the privacy of the Threads app. Even if you don’t have Threads app installed, they can figure out anyone from another fediverse server. That’s the reason fediverse servers should not federate with Meta servers.
They can scrape that data withiut federating. Anyone can, there’s a public API. And I suspect once they federate Threads, Mastodon will be a tiny share of the resulting fediverse.
No to say they won’t ingest all that data, of course, they’ll get their hands on everything they can, but I doubt it’s the primary motivation behind it.
Being part of the fediverse means they potentially get access to a bunch of data through scraping and user interactions.
They can already scrape this data without even being part of a federated community though.
They can already access the data, it’s all federated and it’s all publically available effectively by definition, they don’t need to launch a platform that interacts with Fedi in order to scrape it. And Meta will only be able to scrape user profiling data on the people accessing Fediverse through their own tools and platforms. In the large term, all data is useful and getting the additional facets of how their users interact with a twitter-like platform is good - but I don’t think that’s really why they chose to federate.
But…
What joining Fediverse does offer them is a way of launching their Twitter-rival product with genuine and organic content or activity already present.
Facebook & Instagram’s primary demographics are not internet pioneers, they don’t tend to build new things - they feed off existing activity and build on top of it. They access the platforms to consume content, and only move to creating or posting content over time as they develop networks on the sites. Meta cannot realistically launch a Twitter competitor whole-cloth. The sort of people who joined Twitter early to build that space aren’t joining a Meta product, likewise the people who join new platforms or normal fediverse.
If it launched empty, it would remain empty. People would check it out, see almost no content or no content they care about, and not come back. Meta can only realistically launch a product like Threads with activity already occurring, and things like AI content or fake profiles aren’t necessarily convincing enough to lure in the punters. But Fedi is preexisting and active and there’s already A Thing there that Meta can point their users at, there’s already content to consume and people to interact with.
That’s a very good point. There’s always an agenda when it comes to these massive companies. The more data they have, the more predictions they can make, and the more accurate they’ll be. Understanding how people move through these communities is massive for Meta. The more you understand something, the better you know how to exploit it.
I think they’re making a move on Twitter. They smell blood in the water, Twitter’s weak, not worth buying, but worth supplanting. Here’s the Fedverse with a ready-made platform, so no use re-inventing the wheel. They don’t care that it’s the Fedverse. They just want the interface, to build a replacement.
If Reddit keeps being stupid they can expect the same treatment.
But truly, I know nothing and speculate wildly on most subjects. And I’m new here and understand nothing about the Fedverse.
Twitter’s weak, not worth buying,
Everything has its price. But just like Musk overpaid for Twitter in the first place, he surely thinks it’s more valuable than anyone else in the market does.
I’m also sure that he values it at a price point that’s higher than it will cost Facebook to create a competitor.
If I had to guess, I would say that they want to scrape the data and use it for ad revenue. Not 100% sure but that would be my guess.
Definitely a good guess
They can already do it by running a simple web scraper or running an anonymous instance that federates with everyone in disguise
Federating their own instance(s) would make it far easier than scraping.
I can write a Mastodon scraper in a few minutes, make it scalable in a few days. Definitely easier than implementing ActivityPub in an app.
but unless they are federated we won’t see the ads that they are going to disguise as legitimate user content.
On their app that should be harder to skip because the timeline is based on their algorithm and ads should be unavoidable, but how the hell would they force a user on another platform to see it? And how would they even directly target this person with a specific ad? If what people on instances federated with Threads see on their federated timeline are regular posts from business accounts placed in chronological order, I’m guessing there’d be no problem just blocking those “profiles” and moving on
They can’t. People are simply fearful due to ignorance. No one knows anything at this point, so all this Threads fear mongering feels like a psyop to weaken the fediverse and bottleneck all content that is being submitted to it.
Yeah, for now I’m skeptical because they’re Meta and they have to find ways to monetize this service, but on one day they’ve already overshadowed the rest of the fediverse easily. Even if they can’t profit as effectively off other instances, their instance is already ridiculously big and profitable regardless; the scraping thing really sounds like fear mongering. So if the only downside of federating with Threads is that my federated timeline would get cluttered with business accounts posting ads, I’d be alright with it, as long as I can get more content on my Home timeline from LOTS of people I want to follow who are not willing to interface with Mastodon, Pleroma, etc. Unless they force regular user accounts to publish advertisements to people outside the Threads instance, I’ll take it
Meta’s biggest business has been the manipulation of public opinion for years now. Their entry in the Fediverse is just their latest attempt at keep doing it. Privacy invasion and targeted ads are just tools that enable it for the former, and finance it for the later.
Squash the fediverse before it reaches critical mass.
That’s not how the fediverse works though. Google and Facebook were the two biggest sites online, but even then they still couldn’t “squash” the world wide web, the most successful federated service.
I don’t know what their intentions are in full, but they certainly won’t be good from our perspective. We came here to free ourselves from corporate shackles, not bind ourselves back up in them.
Coercion seems to be a big part of the enshittification process these days. Even once you complete stage 3 and piss everyone off, forcing them to stay against their will is part of the game.
This would force a lot of unwilling people to deal with Facebook, and long-term.
Enshitifying anything and everything online
E.A.A.E.O.
Rolls right off the tongue
I can hear Serj from System of a Down singing this.
Same here. Gotta listen to them again
