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Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Ok, so what is actually the main argument people have to preventatively defederate with Threads? I perhaps haven't thought about it much, but I don't personally see the problem if my instances would federate with them. I'm mentally comparing this to email. If I ran my own email service, or used someone else's, why would I want to block Gmail, or icloud, or Hotmail/Outlook?
Of course if they don't have effective admin/moderation policies and actions then, yeah they should be blocked or limited. The same holds true with email federation.
The owner of the server I'm on wrote a nice post describing his reasoning https://about.scicomm.xyz/doku.php?id=blog:2023:0625_meta_on_the_fediverse_to_block_or_not_to_block
Thanks, that's actually precisely what I was interested in reading. That admin team totally rocks for motivating their decision with such a comprehensive argument.
That post is outstanding and is a wonderful writeup that highlights the danger of associating with a company as morally bankrupt as Meta.
There is concern that Threads will use embrace, extend, extinguish to depreciate the ActiviyPub protocol. Essentially, they adopt the open standard, expand on it with proprietary additions, then when everyone is using the modified standard they drop support for the open standard and now everyone has to play ball by their rules.
I'm also worried that due to content moderation policies, Threads might choose to federate only with a few handpicked mastodon instances. Thus provoking a huge increase of users in these instances because they want to interact with people on threads and causing a centralisation issue, because people will start joining this instances far more than the others.
It would also render useless self hosting a single user instance for yourself.
Ah, yes that is a fair enough concern. Thanks. There are lessons in the fate of XMPP (and HTML with IE I guess?). However ActivityPub seems to have so much more momentum than XMPP ever had. This makes me more optimistic about Fedi.
Also, unlike with messaging which is much more dependent on a small number of people you interact with, I think microblogging is much more personal. If Threads would join, grow big, and then defederate 5 years later I may miss out on following some people but that still wouldn't make me leave Mastodon. I left Twitter after all.
Still, it's a reasonable and interesting concern.
Is it so much of a problem if the rest of the fediverse doesn't follow suit. Most of us and the original devs are here because we don't like mainstream social media and the direction it's going.
So sure threads can show up and start trying to call the shots, but I think if we only except them if what they do is in our best interest it will be fine as we can just break off again and do our own thing if they start trying to head the project in their own direction.
As I don't think most people on here care whether threads is part of the fediverse or not.
My point is they only have power if we go with what they want, and due to the open source nature of this just because they have money and a lot of employees doesn't mean they can take control.
The content on threads are utter garbage. I have tried to get on with it but it doesn't seem to work out for me.
I think the issue is that on most people's feeds, the vast, vast majority of the content that they see would be from the
@threads"instance." Think of how salty people get about the size of mastodon.social or lemmy.world are compared to other instances, and multiply that along with the threat of a poison pill in the form of corporate embrasure.Culturally, the fedi is pretty anti-corporate, so a lot of members are suspicious of centralization / partnership with corporate entities. Though this lens, I think the objections make total sense.
It's honestly kind of irrational. The "embrace, extend, extinguish" stuff is on shaky grounds as a framework as it is, but it wasn't even part of the conversation until people started trying to retroactively justify the knee-jerk rejection to Meta.
So it's mostly "we should grow the "fediverse" into the new universal social tool. No, not like that".
But hey, here we are. I'm on the record saying that I'll mvoe instances if they join to keep them available.
Isn't the entire point of these platforms and the nature of federation is that they get to decide who they federate with and when, and even why?
Sure. And that the users get to pick their instance based on those decisions.
Which is what I'm saying I'll do.
Problem with that train of thought is you always land in weird anarchocapitalist loopholes. Ultimately there is a level of communal decisionmaking that ends up happening and needs some degree of organization, even if the alternatives are also supported on the fringes.
I'm not telling you not to pick your instance, but I was countering your claim that what they are doing is irrational. Because if it's irrational, then the very point of these services is irrational.
I mean, social media sucks. It was a mistake. All of it. This included. So yeah?
But no, a specific choice to defederate can make more or less sense. Not every option is equal. Defederating because some place is too popular and you kinda don't like that it has a bunch of normies in it and is made by a big social media corpo? Kind of irrational. Defederating because disruptive trolls are harassing your users? Yeah, alright.
FWIW, I'm not even saying that an influx of Meta users wouldn't be disruptive. I have a strong suspicion that it would show big gaps on moderation and usability around here if you suddenly added a couple of zeros to the userbase. I still don't think making it a rule that federated services have to be small is the right solution to that.
Democracy is about choice too.
I’d call Trump voters irrational.
By your logic, I couldn’t.
EEE was the first issue folks brought up when threads was announced. It's always been apart of the conversation.
The conversation doesn't start there, though. Before Threads was announced everybody was buzzing about how everyone should come over here and they really hoped new services would join ActivityPub and it should become just like email.
Then Threads and BlueSky started suggesting doing just that and it was all "actually, Google kinda EEE'd the crap out of email and RSS and we don't want those guys here at all".
So no, EEE wasn't always part of the converrsation. It was only part of the conversation when the hipstery claim that the cool obscure thing should be for everybody got replaced by the hipstery claim that the cool obscure thing was selling out and should be gatekept to keep it real.
Feels like this is a argument about perspective. We'll have to agree to disagree.
Fair enough. As long as the different perspectives are represented and the groupthink doesn't take over I don't need everybody to agree with me.
what wrong with facebook rejection
With thinking Facebook sucks? Nothing.
With thinking Facebook sucks and Facebook's audience should stay in Facebook while the "fediverse" stays small and exclusive? That it goes against the stated goals of providing decentralized, open social platforms as a replacement for current closed platforms.
facebook only has one instance
does mastodon
pick one
mastodon.social already gets criticism
Yeah I know plenty of instances limit them making follows approval only. I also saw this line on a person's profile: "if you follow me from mastodon.social I won't approve your requests, migrate to a different instance".
I think the main reason is because mastodon.social has a lot of spam (or has had it in the past) though I'm sure that the threads issue and the fact that they want to federate and encourage federation with threads probably isn't going to help.
stated goal is providing decentralized and open platforms
facebooks instance isn’t decentralized or open
is contradiction
how is decentralized if have all users on one instance
how is irrational