When Meta launched their new Twitter competitor Threads on July 5, they said that it would be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon, and all the other decentralized social networks in the fediverse “soon”.
But on July 14, @alexeheath of the Verge reported that Meta’s saying ActivityPub integration’s “a long way out”. Hey wait a second. Make up your mind already!
From the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say “a long way out” is a clear victory for the free fediverse’s cause.
Actually I still think meta doing activity pub would be overall a good thing and a win for all of us. Users should decide what will be the best platform for them to use, free from any content locking reasons.
Meta being able to create completely new social network overnight and still getting more users then entire Fendiverse without the need to open up anything… That feels more like a loose for me.
But this is a very unpopular opinion here.
hi, anti-Meta person here: it’s not about how many users we have. it’s about Meta’s long track record of insufficient moderation and harvesting of personal data. thanks to their almost nonexistent moderation, they’ve facilitated genocides, let deadly disinformation spread unchecked, and contributed to the rise of fascism. and they harvest enough data from their platforms to create digital duplicates of us, and if they join the Fediverse, of course they’re going to harvest data from anyone federating with them too.
would you trust them to play nice in the Fediverse after all they’ve done?
From the Mastodon blog post about Meta federation:
Will Meta get my data or be able to track me?
Mastodon does not broadcast private data like e-mail or IP address outside of the server your account is hosted on. Our software is built on the reasonable assumption that third party servers cannot be trusted. For example, we cache and reprocess images and videos for you to view, so that the originating server cannot get your IP address, browser name, or time of access. A server you are not signed up with and logged into cannot get your private data or track you across the web. What it can get are your public profile and public posts, which are publicly accessible.
That just shows how little Eugen understands the privacy risks. Why just blocking Meta’s Threads won’t be enough to protect your privacy once they join the fediverse has an example of how federating with Meta can expose private data. And, data can be public but hard to discover (a profile for somebody who only makes followers-only and local-only posts); federating with Threads adds exposure.
If they really wanted to they could already do that by setting up an instance and not publicly announcing it.
I just want to make this clear I’m also anti-meta and that’s why I want them to feel a need to open up for users to make it easier to switch platforms.
I would trust them as much as any other new instance of any other platform that joins the Fendiverse. That’s my point.
As it should be.
Meta didn’t spin up a new service overnight; it’s integrated with an Instagram. The reason why they were able to get 100 million users in a few weeks is because they have a pre-existing user base… do you really think that Meta will give up their users so easily? The users that they make massive profits off of? If so, what makes you think that your local instance would have the resources to work against Meta’s billion dollar marketing budget to ply away a sizable chunk of their users?
Also, Meta now sits on the ActivityPub W3C committee… I don’t think that they will allow portable user accounts any time soon, especially if it threatens their profits.
have you read https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html? If/when you read it, I would be curious on how it changed your view in the topic. Or why it didn’t.
The fediverse is a tool of freedom, morals, ethics, for those that want to be connected, something that no commercial entity will offer. And it’s ok for it to not grow at all costs, or be the widespread available platform. It just needs to be present and faithful to itself.
Yes I read it and I simply do not agree with most of what is said there. XMPP is not dead and saying google killed it on purpose is to much of a simplification.
Worst thing that could happen if we federat with meta and decide on some point that this is a bad instance and block it, is that we go back to where we are now.
But since some governments and news companies already started to run their own mastodon instances it would be easiest for them to just keep up their own instance and federate with threads instead of creating another account on threads.
This plus all de Content created by people from the “free fedivers” would meta bring into a situation where they would want to be federated and therefore would (to an extent) do stuff to satisfy other instances. Our position against meta would be much stronger than how it is now.
So definitely not growing at all cost but excluding all form of commercial use of the fedivers by default would lead to fedivers remaining just a footnote in society without changing anything.
So I want not only meta but all of the big player to use ActivityPup and fighting for our (the users) favor without all their lockin tricks.
you know how they got those ‘more users’?
Yes by making it like a one-click Join from their other very popular platform “Instagram” and advertising it there.
That’s (most probably) why threads is currently not available in the EU. Gatekeeper practices like this would be illegal with the Digital Markets Act. But honestly it would be very easy to get around this. Just make it possible to join without an Instagram account. So I guess there are more concerns from Meta to not fullfil EU Standards than just this.
Sooo I guess EU finally did a good job here.
Thats true. But this also means they didn’t get all their users because they have a good product to offer. But because they are one of the biggest players and the just exploited their market power to will something into existence.
This is also the reason why your opinion is a bit unpopular. They just have a history of exploiting things and using dark practices to achieve their goals.
And if their goal is to dominate and wipe out the fediverse… they have quite some power to leverage. As they demonstrated with this stunt.
(Also this is quite likely their goal, because that’s how capitalism and competition works.)