I look forward to reading everyone’s calm and measured reactions
My primary concern is that they appear to be allowing Thread content to be pulled into other Fedi clients, but not the inverse. So Threads content on Mastodon, but no Mastodon content on Threads. That’s not super great for Mastodon exposure.
Also, given the vast differences in daily active users, wouldn’t Mastodon become flooded, and eventually dependent, on Threads content?
Jfc sounds like they’re just paving over the community with a giant ad of themselves
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I personally remain neutral on this. The issue you point out is definitely a problem, but Threads is just now testing this, so I think it’s too early to tell. Same with embrace, extend, extinguish concerns. People should be vigilant of the risks, and prepared, but we’re still mostly in wait and see land. On the other hand, threads could be a boon for the fidiverse and help to make it the main way social media works in five years time. We just don’t know yet.
There are just always a lot of “the sky is falling” takes about Threads that I think are overblown and reactionary
Just to be extra controversial, I’m actually coming around on Meta as a company a bit. They absolutely were evil, and I don’t fully trust them, but I think they’ve been trying to clean up their image and move in a better direction. I think Meta is genuinely interested in Activitypub and while their intentions are not pure, and are certainly profit driven, I don’t think they have a master plan to destroy the fidiverse. I think they see it in their long term interest for more people to be on the fidiverse so they can more easily compete with TikTok, X, and whatever comes next without the problems of platform lockin and account migration. Also meta is probably the biggest player in open source llm development, so they’ve earned some open source brownie points from me, particularly since I think AI is going to be a big thing and open source development is crucial so we don’t end up ina world where two or three companies control the AGI that everyone else depends on. So my opinion of Meta is evolving past the Cambridge Analytica taste that’s been in my mouth for years.
I actually agree with this take.
People on Mastodon are preemptively blocking federation. What can I say 🤷
Just a nice high five for them not falling for corporate embrace and extinguish bullshit when it is in the embrace phase!
Kinda lame. I wonder what site allows it
Me too! Just keep calm and scroll!
Came here to learn whether I’m supposed to like this
Do you like snarky Wendy’s ads?
…kinda?
Well you are not allowed to
Oh. Sorry, I’ll stop.
Well that was civil
And informative!
Over the last week I’ve truly learned the depths of this and my researched conclusion is … no bueno
Hi everyone, I am collecting preemptive pikachu faces for when meta inevitably attempts to screw the fediverse over. Please put them in replies to this comment so we don’t clutter up the rest of the comments.
- 1999, XMPP is born. 👶
- 2005, Google launches “Talk”, touted as a “great victory for XMPP”, with “large-scale XMPP services”.
- 2012, Google encourages “Talk” users to switch to “Hangouts”.
- 2013, Google drops open XMPP interoperability with other servers.
- 2015, Google begins shutting down “Talk” clients.
- 2017, previous phase is now complete, XMPP is virtually unheard of.
- 2022, Google shuts down all XMPP integration. XMPP is, for all intents an purposes, dead. 🪦
- 2016, Mastodon is born. 👶
- 2023, Meta launches “Thread”, touted as a great victory for Mastodon. ← You are here.
- 2030, Meta encourages “Thread” users to switch to “Fabric”.
- 2031, Meta drops open ActivityPub interoperability with other servers.
- 2033, Meta begins shutting down “Thread” clients.
- 2035, previous phase is now complete, Mastoson is virtually unheard of.
- 2040, Meta shuts down all Mastodon integration. Mastodon is, for all intents an purposes, dead. 🪦
N.B.: The delays in the timeline were copied over verbatim. Historical conditions have to be taken into account, as the popular adoption of internet began in the late 2000s. So it is likely for the “extinguish” phase of Mastodon to happen much faster. I give it 5 years tops. And by 2030, we will all remember it as we now remember XMPP.
2017, previous phase is now complete, XMPP is virtually unheard of.
So it returned back to a state where it would have been without Google anyway.
All the Jabber clients and services combined were never even close to rivaling ICQ, AIM, MSN, Skype, or whatever else ruled the IM space back then.
So it returned back to a state where it would have been without Google anyway.
The state before Google was “up and coming solution for federated chat”
The state after Google was “impractical solution that does not federate¹ properly, and is hard to set up²”.
Those are not the same.
1: because of Google.
2: because of Google.Users don’t care about federation. For them, there is no such category as “federated chat”. There is only “chat”.
XMPP never had significant market share among the instant messengers of the time (except maybe as custom solutions for work chat, but not as a consumer service).
Yeah, of course it would have not ever been a mainstream thing for end users. But Google definitely nipped them in the bud, both by providing a (bogus) drive behind the XMPP development (and so, preventing anyone else from doing so), and also by kickstarting them into relative widespread use instead of letting them grow organically.
If they had, there is a possibility XMPP would have become a service provided by nerds for their friends and family as soon as 2010, like email, or more recently, nextcloud.
And it would have been a valid option for corporate solutions. But no, instead, we got slack. Thanks, Google.
Same old corporate strategy. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Embrace extend extinguish
Don’t federate with corps, it will only end badly
corpo philosophy 101
I wouldn’t be too worried about Threads joining the fediverse.
They had the perfect opportunity to dethrone X with a superior app but have given users the most barebones piece of shit that doesn’t even have support for hashtags or trending topics.
Mastodon has this functionality.
Last time I booted up Threads, my feed was flooded with e-girls posting twerking videos. I don’t follow any such accounts on Threads nor Instagram and I don’t like it when my social media feels like a softcore porn platform.
it’s also doing a lot better than Mastodon because they integrated it with Instagram
I wish they wouldn’t. Stay a walled garden.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think this is actually a great thing for Mastodon. The truth is the majority of people are just never going to sign up for a Mastodon server as they stand today. The majority of people want algorithmic feeds run by a central entity. I know the people here don’t want that, but that’s what the majority of people do want. Will I use Threads? No but if this breathes more life into Mastodon and exposes more people to the concept then that is a good thing. Being able to use a client of your choice to interact with people on something like Threads is also a very good thing. The alternative is a completely closed social network like Twitter.
I know, I know “embrace, extend, extinguish”, but literally this is the best that we can hope for unfortunately. The alternative is everyone goes and uses a closed system.
Google the history of xmpp. This is exactly the same.
It’s not a good thing.
So we can let Mastodon die on the vine or chance it dying? Ok, I know my choice.
It’s not like the majority of people are already on open protocols. I’m sure Threads dwarfs Masrodon usage just as Twitter and possibly even BlueSky.
IF Mastodon was dominate I might have a different view but it’s not. If Threads federates then there is an opportunity to push people to other clients which make switching to a Mastodon/ActivityPub server much easier. That’s literally only upside. It’s not like the people on Mastodon now are going to leave it for Threads.
They might end up being forced to, should Threads decide to revert.
Mastodon users will inevitably hook up on Threads communities instead of fostering their own, and at that point being left to their own devices would be a catastrophe.
And yes, this is exactly what happened to xmpp.
I simply don’t trust meta, they have incredibly bad precedent.
I’m not sure. Might be a great thing, but Facebook might equally be the equivalent of a whale landing in a small pond, killing everything else in the process.
If true, I would expect this link to work, but it’s 404 at the time of this comment:
Testes nuts.
Honestly I think this is good for the fediverse.
It instantly boosts mastodon and Pixelfed’s reach, which means people won’t dismiss posting there as it never gets seen.
I would never open a Threads account, but it unlocks seeing content from a lot of people I like who ditched Twitter but didn’t understand mastodon.
Yes, this can also be Embrace, Extend Extinguish, but I’m happy for the publicity.
If people don’t like it they can join an instance that defederatrs from Meta and that’s totally fine.
This sounds like it’s NOT going to increase mastodon and pixelfed’s reach
it doesn’t sound like you’ll be able to post from Mastodon to Threads
It looks like they’re only pushing right now, they’re not allowing Threads users to pull content in from the broader fediverse. Threads content gets exposure on Mastodon, but not the other way around.
So it seems like they’re just doing it to push their posts onto instances almost as advertisment. Not a great practice, seems very spammy to me.
Ah, that’s unfortunate.
It’s funny how “mastodon is too complicated” stops when the instance they pick is Threads.
🤔
Anyone using Threads who can tell how does it goes?
Edit: I believe no one it’s using Threads LMAO.
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.
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.
