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Threads Has Begun Federating Via ActivityPub
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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Technology
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I can follow him on kbin.
https://kbin.social/u/@mosseri@threads.net/posts
Interoperability was the purpose of activitypub. I'm not oppossed to Meta , Tumblr and wordpress joining the fediverse.
As long as I can use an open source community platform.
Let's hope this isn't the first step of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Although in reality it probably is.
It will end up being de facto EEE, the same way it's become functionally impossible to run your own email server. Sure you technically can, but the handful of big players block everything else and make it impossible to actually email anyone.
It'll be like that on the fediverse. Big companies like this will dominate the space, refuse to federate with most others except the big players, and people will realize that unless you only want a mastodon instance with like 20 people on it, it won't be worth the trouble.
That's not even true, I run my own mailserver for private and a business and it works like expected.
Absolutely, Outlook.com is by far the worst in this regard. I stopped running my own mail server a few years ago because it was just unbearable.
Are you using a residential IP? There are lists of residential IP ranges for mail servers to block, no matter how well configured.
Hm, I thought hosting providers should be fine unless you just happened to get an IP in a block that some spammers also used to use... but then again, I stopped self-hosting email several years ago because of all the hoops one has to constantly jump through (for reference, it used to work fine from Online.net's —now Scaleway— bare metal servers, like 5 years ago).
So what do you suggest, out of curiosity? I have the same assessment, it just seems like the only way it could work, long-term and for all users.
I think the cat's out of the bag. There's no stopping it at this point. And even if ever person who runs a Mastodon server got together to push back, defederated with Threads and BlueSky, and tried to stay away, it wouldn't even be a blip on the radar for these big players.
To be honest, I'm not sold on federation in general for social media. I think it's an answer to the wrong question. We're asking "how can we make social media better?" and not "why do we need social media at all?"
Federation has shown itself to be extremely problematic. You have people coming and going from other instances that you don't control and can't enforce in any way other than to just block the instance. If I have e.g. a Mastodon instance based around a safe, positive space for the queer community, and others have instances based around bigotry, white supremacy, transphobia, etc. (which they do), then I either allow bigots to come and go, or I have to spend an inordinate amount of extra time on moderation. Same goes for Lemmy/kbin/etc.
People are also continuing to think with a limited frame of reference. The idea of federation is still "how can I get all my 'content' in one place?" because we've been dominated by these monolithic walled gardens for the last decade. Sure it might be annoying to have to have multiple logins for difference services, but I'd rather that over having a single place where Nazis can come and go as they please with few to no tools to stop them.
Hmm. I don't know if weak moderation tools are intrinsic to federation. You can certainly ban users from other instances, and if that doesn't already hide their comments on other instances, it could.
People have talked about going back to disconnected forums recently, notably Kurzgesagt, but it is annoying, to the point where it can kill some spaces which are too niche or frivolous to survive alone. I don't think r/WTFaucet on Reddit could be a standalone forum, for example. I guess if it saves our civilisation like they were saying the I could make that sacrifice.
Most of those communities preemptively blocked threads months ago.
What communities are you talking about specifically? I tried but I haven’t yet found a list of those that defederated preemptively. I can’t imagine it’s the majority of instances/users.
100% agree, I think most reactions here are blown way out of proportion even though I can relate to the general "fuck meta" attitude.
Of course cooperate social media isn’t the only harmful social media, if anything it might be the most civil one for its scale, simply because they’re trying to sell ads next to the content so the content can’t be complete garbage. They also have a bunch of other incentives that ultimately make it a shit experience for everyone, but there is an incentive to moderate.
Something to remember is that it isn’t the company producing the harmful content. It’s people.
Yes it is, but people are sheep. Wolf's come to get dinner.
They do. Their business model is to take out upstarts with growing popularity trends. By the time they actually get big, it's too late.
With several organisations making the move to the fediverse, it is something they want to deal with.
Look at the fediverse’s monthly active users, it’s declining. There’s a pretty solid wall of friction when trying to participate and the vast majority of people won’t ever be a part of it in its current state. There’s no upward tend here and I doubt that it’s ever going to be a real danger for meta.
Isn't Bluesky much smaller than Mastodon?
I think Bluesky is even smaller. It probably could’ve been a Twitter competitor before threads came around.
EEE doesn't work with FOSS, where anyone can fork a project and go with it.
Ask Oracle how well EEE worked for them with Sun, Java, or MySQL. Ask Microsoft how well adding the WSL worked to kill Linux.
Threads can try as much as they want, the fediverse is already full of different projects like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Calckey, etc. and they aren't extinguishing each other.
The point of EEE isn't outright destruction but marketplace irrelevance. FOSS projects can absolutely be hit by it.
Java actually was hit by EEE tactics from Microsoft, and they were actually rather successful. Sun has to sue MS to stop them from calling their Java VMs Java.
HTML was hit by EEE tactics so well that for years IE was the only game in town and other browsers couldn't compete.
Sun sued MS to stop them from calling it "Java™", then Oracle failed spectacularly to EEE it when they lost the API lawsuit against Google.
MSIE's popularity arose from monopolistic practices by Microsoft, not its EEE tactics against HTML, which failed miserably.
I would know it, I was there: everyone started making websites in Flash because it was the multiplatform solution, even if it had more security holes than a female duck cornered by a flock of horny drakes, only MS sellouts used MSIE's proprietary extensions to HTML, only Oracle sellouts used post-Sun Java... and it all went down the drain the moment JavaScript evolved to a point of allowing polyfills to make a single codebase compatible with all browsers.
Now all browsers are FOSS-based, with de-branded forked versions making the rounds, and it's good.
Because that was part of MS's EEE strategy.
Ooo boy you do not remember your history.
When Microsoft started pushing IE, they did everything in their power to sabotage the competition. That included the creation of a proprietary web extension called ActiveX. Back in the day, this, along with non-standard behaviour when dealing with the actual standards, was the reason why many, many sites would not work in non-IE browsers. Developers only cared about what worked in IE, not what was standard. That didn't change until the arrival of Firefox.
You know how trademarks work? Sue or lose it.
I remember my history quite well, all the way back to Mosaic and before. I also remember "Best viewed with Netscape" websites (1994), when everyone and his uncle had a proprietary plugin they were trying to push, and only a handful of developers (I was one of them) actually cared about any standards. Firefox (2004) came very late to the party, way after the "MSIE can't be uninstalled from Windows" shenanigans (1997).
Wouldn't have applied in this case. Microsoft actually did have permission from Sun to use the trademark...right up until they made their Java VM incompatible with base Java, and Sun sued to terminate the agreement.
Okay? And? None of them had any actual leverage to force people into using their standards. Microsoft had a de facto monopoly on an essential bit of computing software that they leveraged to hell and back to make their proprietary standards THE de facto standard.
And at that point, IE had a 97% market share. Care to take a wild stab in the dark why?
And... they still failed miserably. All their anticompetitive agreements to force PC sellers to preinstall Windows with MSIE as the default browser, all their agreements with Apple to make MSIE the default browser on OSX, didn't change the fact that ActiveX was as popular as Java outside of intranets, and everyone turned to Flash to overcome the incompatibilities between browsers.
MSIE was a scourge for web developers, because every web had to be checked with the majority player who wasn't standards compliant, yet it still didn't manage to take over HTML, not even with a 97% market share, not ever.
My main browsers have been MOSAIC, Netscape, then Firefox, during all that time. I can say with a straight face that I only ever used MSIE, Opera, or Safari, to make sure a web was still working in them, while 99% of the WWW was still working fine with a standards compliant browser (plus Flash).
Nowadays all browsers are standards compliant... with the living standard that is Chromium, which not even Google itself can EEE (see how Firefox is adding Manifest V3 without deprecating the adbloker API that Google wanted to extinguish).
That worked pretty well to stop Microsoft's attempt at EEE-ing it, didn't it? However, keep in mind that Java was not FOSS back then (1996-2001), it only got open sourced in 2006. The first stab at EEE-ing a FOSS Java, was Oracle's, and that didn't go well. Now Microsoft is releasing builds of OpenJDK, which they won't EEE either.