Back to business as usual. The reality is that the majority of people can’t be bothered with privacy and other scandals from GAFAM.
The silver lining of the whole Reddit and Twitter fiasco is that more people are interested in and participating in a decentralized network. That’s a good thing for the community.
Except they have thoroughly infiltrated the fediverse to the point where the simple idea of not federating with FACEBOOK of all companies is somehow controversial now.
That’s how I got here. I realized how many hours I was spending on Reddit and, once Slide stopped working I really just stopped using Reddit for the most part.
And now there’s Slide for Lemmy
I can barely find anything in Arabic on the fediverse, but on threads I can find all the relevant and local posts I want in Arabic
deleted by creator
Threads is the narcissism of Instgrammers and the psychopathy of Twitterers
The average Twitter user has no idea what Mastodon is.
Die average Twitter user doesn’t even care about not knowing what it is.
Why would you want them to die?
Die Twitter users, die!
Are threads federated?
It suits them though
I’m using the Thunder app to access my lemmy.world account. Is Mastodon also Lemmy? Can I browse lemmy.world and mastodon at the same time? I’m so new and vv confused.
There are 1 billion active users on Instagram and those users were invited to Threads using an existing account. Celebrities, businesses, streamers, etc. all popped up on Threads within the first few hours of public release.
I’m a big nerd and just learned about the fediverse within recent months. Everyone else I know who uses Twitter and Threads have no clue what Mastodon is.
Is it just me or does threads symbol look like no step on snek?
No, it’s mastodon but centralized. It takes all the difficulty out of signing up for the fediverse, like finding a server. I said it from day 1 on mastodon. We will never see mass adoption until there’s a simple sign up process. People like centralized because it’s easier.
Huh? The default Mastodon app signs you up on mastodon.social by default. Nothing complicated about that:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/
And the devs faced major opposition for that, because plenty of people accused them of wanting to centralize the decentralized network with that move.
Finding a server could not be any easier: https://joinmastodon.org/servers
If they can’t manage that then maybe they should not be on the internet. If my 60yo dad can do it then so can they. Learned helplessness in anything involving IT is my pet peeve.Yeah but, it sounds like you can read and retain information long enough to make decisions on your own.
Most people can’t even grasp scrolling past the ads in a Google search. If they even get to Google in the first place.
Tbh, this is not a good solution.
It dumps you in front of a wall of 22 pages of servers on my laptop (equivalent to 4.35 meters).
Most of which have completely nonsensical descriptions.
If I look at e.g. the first page (top 6 servers) I get these:
- mastodon.social: The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit
- mstdn.jp: Mastodon日本鯖です． よろしくお願いいたします。 (Maintained by Sujitech, LLC)
- mstdn.social: A general-purpose Mastodon server with a 500 character limit. All languages are welcome.
- mastodon.world: Generic Mastodon server for anyone to use.
- mas.to: Hello! mas.to is a fast, up-to-date and fun Mastodon server.
- mastodon.online: A newer server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit
Ok, so of these I can only rule out mstdn.jp, because I don’t speak Japanese.
mastodon.social and mastodon.official are, I guess, the “official” instances, with one of them being newer, for some reason. What does that mean? No idea. Is mastodon.social running out dated software? If not, why fork the instances at all?
mstdn.social and mastodon.world mention that they are general purpose. Without (and even with) Fediverse experience, I would expect any social media platform to be general purpose unless otherwise stated. So they basically have no description.
mas.to mentions only that it’s “fast, up-to-date and fun”. That basically has no meaning, except all other instances are slow, outdated and boring. So now I am worried.
mstdn.social says it has a 500 character limit. Without googleing a new user would have no idea what the regular character limits are. And I have no idea whether that will cause issues when interacting with other instances.
This page is like getting to a used car dealership without a clue about cars and you ask the car dealer to help you choose a car, and the dealer is like “Yeah, so I’m gonna help you. The right car for you is any car on the property of the dealership.”
Exactly, I downloaded Mastodon and deleted it in one day. It was too complicated (in an annoying way) to use. I’m very IT literate, but I don’t want to learn to use a platform, or do research. I want it to work out of the box, and I want it to be easy and the content to be accessible. Now think about all the non-IT literate people out there, of course Threads will do well because it’s just create an account and you’re good to go… If Mastodon was like that I would use it.
I’ve been trying to hammer this point home.
I wish devs would wake up and create a default easy mode sign-up for the fediverse with an option to click “advanced sign-up” if you choose to do so.
The easy mode would just automatically assign an instance based upon some algorithm.
I wish the devs would wake up and create a default easy mode sign-up for creating a web site. The web will never catch on with all this complicated stuff.
Honestly I like the fact that there is some difficulty in the sign up. I think it brings a better quality of people to the Fediverse.
How?
Well, like asking users what their preferences are and select the servers based on the criteria users have chosen?
Hmm actually yeah this is a good idea, but the problem is that there’s so many servers that I feel that after choosing criteria there’d still be a bunch of servers in the list and the problem remains, right? Just bouncing ideas. I quite like this idea though.
Then the algo recommends the one with the lowest load and hides the others behind a … icon or something.
Mm this could be a problem because server load is too unpredictable. I would actually say just randomize the list, so that it kinda does its own “load balancing” by incentivizing to pick whatever random top one it selected?
Yeah, whatever metric. Could also use a mix of number of users, some form of reputation measurement, uptime, etc.
I mostly meant that the system should pick a “best server” and recommend that. Smarter people than me can come up with the best metric.
But swamping the user with >100 servers to pick from is counterproductive.
How is it difficult to find a server? Just pick whatever server you come across first and create an account.
You tell the average dude about how servers exist and the first instinct is that it matters, so they stop, fret about the importance, look for a second, then just drop it because they dont give enough hoots yet to invest more effort versus using a centralized service.
Want ppl to join, don’t even tell them about servers. No choice paralysis, no fear of being wrong, nada
The average dude who can’t figure out how to sign up for an account on a website can go fuck off back to Facebook, where SOMEHOW they managed to create an account.
I haven’t used Mastodon, but on Lemmy the instance you are on totally matters.
For example, beehaw.org is pretty happy to defederate. It tries to give you a more moderated and curated environment. Feddit.de is slow, laggy and often outdated, and they just deactivated federation in general (at least they said so, to me federation seems to be still working) to avoid that session stealing vulnerability.
In general, federation is pretty buggy right now, with federated posts/comments having a decent chance of not being replicated.
So the choice of instance really does make a difference. But there is no help at all up front to choose the correct instance.
And just hopping over to another instance is also not a great solution, since people are used to build their social media account. It’s not some anonymous throw-away thing.
I the case of lemmy, i feel like it’s definitely some anonymous throw-away thing. We’re not here to build a follower base are we?
Much less than on other platforms, that’s true, but after a while you do start recognizing usernames again.
Sure there’s exceptions like SrGrafo on Reddit but most are here to lurk around or engage in random discussions
you could also simply recommend them an instance
It looks like most people don’t have enough braincells to do such a simple task. Isn’t it just nice to live in a world like this?
At least this is one thing that’s not as bad as decades ago. Just remembering how computer illiterate most of the developed world used to be.
Most people weren’t ever taught about this shit and had no reason to spend time learning about it on their own. Most of us are either professional or amateur nerds, figuring this out wasn’t really that hard because of our circumstances rather than our ~superior brains~
They have just as many braincells as you, throw that attitude away.
I think it’s a good thing honestly. It brings a better quality of people here in my opinion.
I’ve seen people lose their shit over having to “sign up for another app” and honestly I don’t want people who have no respect for their data, privacy and have the personality of a wet cardboard right-wing conservative on the fediverse. That’s why Fb exists. We are here as users because we chose to, as other people chose what best suits them.
Centralization is the core problem of social media though. It allows a single entity control over the data and as soon as you have that, you have Zuck.
Centralization isn’t the problem, privatization is. If the single entity that controlled the data was democraticly controlled and not run for profitability it’d be the best of all worlds.
In 2023, there is very little democratically controlled anything left that has not been tainted by the ‘capitalist gains mindset’ - most democratic social programs that are far more fundamental than a social network have either been corrupted and impaired by corporate greed or have had enough legislative protections or funding sources cut out that they can no longer operate properly, allowing the argument for ‘privatisation’ - a one way ticket back to corporate greed. They operate at the whims of corporations and no longer serve the people.
While I believe what you say is true, it’s not something we’re capable of in the current state of civilisation.
Everything you said is true, democracy does not exist under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. I’m just saying, centralization isn’t the problem. Furthermore you can’t escape capitalism by decentralizing.
True, but it makes it possible to breakaway from an instance or leaders that are toxic/circumventing your privacy for profit without having to find a new tool or network. You can just hop to another instance.
It’s possible as long as competition exists, but every market trends towards monopolization. EEE is real.
All public content on the web is heavily surveillanced through crawling bots by Google and alike.
This is true, but I think that this meme refers to the app though. The regular mastodon app doesn’t require as many data.
Talk to the “Defederate from Threads because it will steal all the Fediverse data” crowd about that even though a federated instance sees as much as Google’s crawlers.
even though a federated instance sees as much as Google’s crawlers
Federated instances can track which users have upvoted & downvoted on all federated content, which crawlers can’t see (unless they’re crawling Kbin which specifically shows this data in the UI).
In the early Websocket version of Lemmy’s UI you could see all this data for yourself, it would be a treasure trove for Facebook/Meta especially if they’re able to link it back to your ad profile. They’d be able to monitor real time activity of users outside the platform just by subscribing to communities, and wouldn’t need to waste time developing scrapers.
Knowing Meta’s addiction to data, they can infer a list of your subscribed communities by looking at which ones you are active in the most (using these to then identify your interests), and identify what timezone you’re in based on when you’re active on Lemmy. There’s a lot more they can do with the federated data though, some of which admittedly can be done using your public data.
Scraping a public profile is one thing, but presumably stalking users en masse with pseudoprivate vote data is a bit far IMO, especially with the likelihood of Facebook using this data for building ad profiles
it would be a treasure trove for Facebook/Meta
Given the tiny user base compared to Threads: No.
They’d be able to monitor real time activity of users outside the platform just by subscribing to communities, and wouldn’t need to waste time developing scrapers.
They’re “wasting time” developing ActivityPub support when they could just as well deploy a Mastodon Docker image on an inconspicuous domain name.
stalking users en masse
Maybe all Fediverse instances should block every single Chrome and Edge user. Also every instance hosted on AWS should be blocked. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are every bit as stalkery if not more.
Given the tiny user base compared to Threads: No.
True.
In my opinion though, the majority of these are just Instagram accounts - that originally signed up for an image sharing social network. While a lot of them are going to try Threads, a lot of them are likely to just lurk.
They’re “wasting time” developing ActivityPub support when they could just as well deploy a Mastodon Docker image on an inconspicuous domain name.
And be on the hook for releasing the source code a la Truth Social?
To me this sounds like a whataboutism IMO. You don’t need much to create an ActivityPub data ingest program - you quite literally ask the server to always send you updates. Facebook has probably already got something like this set up on Mastodon anyway, and used the NDA’d instance owner meetings to keep it whitelisted.
Maybe all Fediverse instances should block every single Chrome and Edge user. Also every instance hosted on AWS should be blocked. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are every bit as stalkery if not more.
Just because online tracking is normalised does not mean you should just accept it IMO. Although looking at your response, I’m assuming you just don’t care about it 🤷♂️ which is fine if that works for you.
Facebook is literally doing everything they can to stay intrusive and relevant, even if those things are kinda shitty, while just giving everyone “we care about your privacy” lip service and empty “we’re sorry” apologies in Congress.
My issues with FB specifically:
- Access to your contacts via WhatsApp, and their real names if they’re saved as such
- Run social experiments on users without prior consent, such as filling feeds with negative content
- Swallowed the low end VR market with the affordable Oculus headset, having a negative effect on VR game quality for users with high end headsets (see “Onward”). The community has coined the term Questification for this
- Cambridge Analytica 🙄
- Copying Snapchat’s stories and ephemeral image messages into both Instagram and WhatsApp after Snap Inc turned down their purchase offer
- So many data breaches & leaks that people have stopped caring
There’s a bunch more but you probably are already aware of them. It boils down to Facebook not being a company that I believe is worth trusting.
Google is the closest analog to FB, but they’re not running social experiments on you without your consent (unless you want to speculate on YouTube’s algorithm), and they’ve kept user data safe. Don’t get me wrong, I do not like Google either.
Amazon’s antics are mainly confined to online retail, same goes for their ads service if that still exists.
Microsoft is very, very easily avoided, with the obvious exception of work environments. They’re kind of irrelevant as a company outside of Azure cloud, Xbox and Windows computers. There’s ADO but that feeds back into the work environment thing.
If you are interested in continuing the conversation, I’m curious as to what your opinion of Facebook is? I don’t really have any other response so just interested in hearing your perspective.
And be on the hook for releasing the source code a la Truth Social?
No modifications to the upstream source means that no modified sources need to be released. Lemmy also just points to the Github in the footer.
Although looking at your response, I’m assuming you just don’t care about it 🤷♂️ which is fine if that works for you.
Tracking is not fine for me but it’s also something that each user should decide for themself. One should be aware that public content is really public and anyone can see it. If I don’t want to accidentally like something in Threads, Mastodon allows me to block entire domains. The instance does not need to pretend to be my parent and protect me.
My issues with FB specifically
And nothing is about blocking federation with Threads.
Google is the closest analog to FB, but they’re not running social experiments on you without your consent (unless you want to speculate on YouTube’s algorithm)
As someone who recently got very funky stuff on YouTube which disappeared on a private tab: There are experiments going on.
Not sure what experiments on Facebooks have to do with federation but this underlines my thought that people just look up for excuses because blocking Threads feels right to them even if there is little technological reason for this, especially considering that ActivityPub support is not even there and nobody can make an informed decision about the effect of Threads on the network.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not like Google either.
So blocking all Chrome users then?
Amazon’s antics are mainly confined to online retail, same goes for their ads service if that still exists.
And everything hosted on AWS.
Microsoft is very, very easily avoided, with the obvious exception of work environments.
Threads accounts can also be easily avoided on Mastodon because users can just block entire domains, therefore the instances don’t need to patronize its users.
If I were a Chrome or Edge user and synced all my history to Google/MS, this is literally tracking.
I’m curious as to what your opinion of Facebook is?
facebook.com is lame. The Meta corporation is run by a soulless robot but there are some smart engineers employed there who do good work on open source projects. My workplace wants me to use WhatsApp so I have it on my work phone only, I decided on my own not to install it on my private phone but would not want an Android ROM where the maintainer decided for me that I must not ever install WhatsApp because people should be able to decide for themselves which content they consume. Their VR products look interesting but AFAIK they mandate an account which is against my conviction to not be patronized by I product I paid for.
That’s one thing and it is hard to be free of, but here I think it is also relevant that the website/client apps surveil you too.
iOS and Android as well as modern browsers actually limit a lot what an app or a website can gather and if Mastodon instances were to federate with Threads, Facebook would not even be able to see anything beyond public data which actually makes federation with Threads a privacy tool.
I’m less concerned about my public facing profile (I intended it to be public after all), more worried about them fingerprinting my browser and correlating it to my personal life and personal browsing, and then selling that entire dataset. It would be really hard for Lemmy to do that, really easy for Facebook.
Do you mean the bots they use to index stuff for their search engine? Isn’t that how all modern search engines function?
Yes, of course but a very large chunk of the super vocal crowd demanding that everyone defederate from Threads is claiming that federation somehow transfers private data to Meta.
I mean, as soon as Threads starts federating, Meta will be pulling shit-tons of data from those instances. I guess it’s all publically available anyhow? But federation will definitely be handing it to them on a silver platter.
The real concern is that federating with Threads might create network effects that pull Fediverse users more and more into just using Threads, so that when it inevitably stops federating those users will essentially have been poached into yet another Facebook walled garden.
Another concern I’ve seen mentioned is, a lot of instances have rules against advertising. Threads exists explicitly to make money off advertising (and selling users’ data). That’s a conflict of interest that all but guarantees eventual rule violations.
And finally, Facebook is just a garbage corporation. They’ve gotten away with a lot of shit. If I ran my own instance, I’d sure as shit defederate from them.
But federation will definitely be handing it to them on a silver platter.
Not really because all those big web companies already have crawlers already anyway. It’s literally more work for them to support open standards than it is not.
Plus they already have 100 million Threads users. They don’t care about the 2mil Mastodon users.
The real concern is that federating with Threads might create network effects that pull Fediverse users more and more into just using Threads
“I can’t follow all the cool entertainment accounts from here, so I follow them on Threads instead.” <-- more likely.
Another concern I’ve seen mentioned is, a lot of instances have rules against advertising.
Threads cannot make other instances run ads.
And finally, Facebook is just a garbage corporation.
Facebook is one of the biggest contributors to OpenStreetMap and makes lots of open source software. I can say with 100% confidence that you’ve used software by Facebook even if you never ever visited any Facebook/Meta service. Just because parts of a big corp suck bad, doesn’t mean that everything they make sucks.
I find it so hilarious that so many freak out about stupid Facebook, yet fucking Truth Social by Trump (which is literally a Mastodon instance full of neo-nazis) is barely blocked by anyone.
Threads cannot make other instances run ads.
I stopped here because you just showed how little you know about the situation. What’s to stop them posting paid advertisements as posts on their platform, boosted by millions of their users engagement, to the top of feeds in the fediverse? Oh, it’s defederation.
I stopped here because you just showed how little you know about the situation.
Well, unlike you I’ve actually read the announcement by the LW admins about Threads.
What’s to stop them posting paid advertisements as posts on their platform, boosted by millions of their users engagement, to the top of feeds in the fediverse?
Simply not following accounts you don’t like, duh.
I’m on lemmy, I don’t follow any accounts. Good job showing how limited your knowledge of the fediverse is and confirming you’re as dumb as I thought in one fell swoop.
Facebook is one of the biggest contributors to OpenStreetMap and makes lots of open source software.
I’d like to know more about this.
I’d like to know more about this.
-
https://github.com/facebook (which includes the zsdt compression algorithm and the React web framework)
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https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activities/Meta
-
It blows my mind how anyone is being able to create something worse than twitter, truly fascinting.
Why is there a mouse in top left?
The thing I noticed right out of the gate when I went slumming on Threads is that the Android app package is 77MB. Compare that to Mastodon at 2.5MB.
Two apps that (from the user’s perspective) do pretty much the same thing - make queries to servers and display pieces of text on the screen, maybe with some pictures or videos. Not that hard.
So what does that extra 74MB of bloat in the Threads app do? Meta’s not telling us…
Tbh bloat usually has nothing to do with tracking or something. Additional code is actually super light-weight. To add full tracking and stuff, we might be looking at a few 100kb additional size.
Using fat frameworks like react native adds much more size. Maybe another 5-10MB.
But what really takes a lot of space is animations, images, background images and stuff like that. A high-res image might take multiple MB on it’s own. Multiple of them will take much more.
Edit: I just downloaded and unpacked the newest thread’s version’s APK and unpacked it.
It has an upacked size of 143MB, of which 83.7MB are assets.
The compiled code including framework and all is 56.9MB. The rest (2.4MB) are metadata.
Mastodon has an uncompressed size of 4.3MB of which 2.4MB are code.
To be fair, Threads is almost certainly built with React Native which always leads to bigger app bundles. Not to say that there isn’t anything fishy in there, but that’s part of the reason.
As mentioned in other comments, tracking logic is going to be so negligible at those sizes that it’s not even worth talking about - it’d be like 100kb at worst.
The problem is Meta is extremely inefficient in writing mobile apps. They solve many problems by just chucking libraries at them, but those libraries are “jack of all trades” type libraries. They use React which is abysmally large, and tons of their own monolithic garbage.
When you write an app from scratch, you only use the pieces you need. Meta is an absolute monolith with years and years of code that’s been added over time and it’s easier to just “copy/paste” most stuff they’ve ever written than to start over.
This is the equivalent of suspecting one of two books to be containing Nazi propaganda because it has more pages in it.
I’m not saying you should not be suspicious of the content of Threads but using size as a metric for it seems nonsensical to a software dev.
I think it’s because threads is just a new front end for instagram. It’s just instagram with a twitter skin applied to it.
Just different tech used most likely. Mastodon is a native app and Threads probably something like React Native, so it has a JS runtime inside and a bunch of dependencies.
