“Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon. They can also find you with your full username @username@threads.net.” [1]
People on the Fediverse expected it very much. Meta already was trying to talk to the larger instances "off the record"[1]. Fediverse users are already planning to boycott any instance which federates with Meta to block any Embrace, Extend and Extinguish moves.
Why? I would love for the general public to be able to connect to Fediverse. I don't love Meta per se, but let be real here, the majority of people are not gonna sign up for random instances that run by someone they don' know, to interact with a very small and niche subset of people, with a risk of it being shut down by that said person due to whatever personal circumstances they may have. It's the biggest obstacles when convincing people to switch to Mastodon.
If this rumor is real and Threads takes off, you can still stay in whichever instance that you like, but now be able to get updates from the artist, the experts, educators, politicians, the influencers that would not have joined the Fediverse otherwise. And more importantly, more people now can get updates from you. Reach might not be something you personally appreciate but it's very important for content creators.
Come on, Facebook is not doing this out of goodness of their hearts. They have some hidden motive (e.g. EEE, data scraping), as always, and it's good people finally don't trust them from the start.
I’m with you here and really it’s just a minority of fedi instances that are going to defederate and that’s fine. I look forward to hopefully being able to follow creators once again without needing to use bots
Too late for that :-). But good example: gmail is gatekeeper for “deliverability”. EEE doesn’t have to be a malicious conspiracy. It can happen as an emergent property of consolidation.
>If this rumor is real and Threads takes off, you can still stay in whichever instance that you like, but now be able to get updates from the artist, the experts, educators, politicians, the influencers that would not have joined the Fediverse otherwise. And more importantly, more people now can get updates from you. Reach might not be something you personally appreciate but it's very important for content creators.
Then those content creators can set up their own (or pay someone else to do so) Fediverse instances. The Fediverse is decentralized on purpose to avoid the kinds of lock-in that FB/IG/etc. require.
I want no part of that, which is why I don't use such centralized services. As such, why should I allow those same centralized services run by greedy scumbags anywhere near my instance(s) or even my consciousness?
Can you provide me with a cogent argument as to why, after making the effort to get away from those toxic ad-riddled environments, I should welcome those same folks into my world? I imagine that could be an interesting discussion.
The main reason why is that Meta is a colossal vast data gathering beast, that for example flagrantly fucks around bypassing the GDPR. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36583651
Now, I personally I think it's trying to swim up the waterfall & ultimately worse for everyone, but: Mastadon specifically has had a strong history of being anti-search, anti-scraping. You aren't supposed to be surveiling folks at industrial scale on the fediverse.
There's widespread skepticism about Meta respecting rules of the road. Having a huge giant shark join the pool of lots of little fish seems like a scary proposition. How we can still protect & have sovereignty over our different fedi-sites is a real question when there's a company with so much technical, economic, and popular leverages.
Mastodon's culture of anti-everything is naive. All posts (except "DMs") are public and can be scraped and made searchable at will for anyone mildly motivated to do so.
I'm honestly pretty skeptical about the fediverse aspect of Threads. It suggests that if I open a new fediverse instance and follow their accounts, I can suck in their timeline and do with it whatever I want. In particular, to bypass ads.
Hence, I could make a "best of Threads" fediverse instance without ads. Or maybe put my own ads on it.
Or, I could build my own client on top of the Threads instance.
> Mastodon's culture of anti-everything is naive. All posts (except "DMs") are public and can be scraped and made searchable at will for anyone mildly motivated to do so.
It's the opposite of naive: it's extremely well thought out and heavily deliberated. Making so many things "public" by default is an invite to people. It's an intentional welcome mat in old school "Internet 1.0" sort of way. But just because you want to welcome people doesn't mean you have to welcome robots (crawlers, etc). Many instances do that deliberately in a very old school "Internet 1.0" way by saying so in their ROBOTS.TXT file (in addition to other places).
In the old web, crawlers were expected to read ROBOTS.TXT and no matter how "public" they thought the website was they found, ROBOTS.TXT was supposed to be the final word.
Anyone scraping or making searchable "at will" random chunks of the Fediverse is easily violating some number of ROBOTS.TXT files. That is an ancient technical convention that isn't new or naive. The internet knew even then that bad actors would ignore ROBOTS.TXT files. The old internet learned to name and shame the bad actors, and in some cases would back that up by force with firewall blocks and in some cases lawsuits. Mastodon does that too. That's why a lot of Mastodon instances are preemptively blocking Threads, because they don't trust Meta to follow good behaviors such as checking ROBOTS.TXT, because Meta hasn't shown a history of being a good actor there and because Thread's privacy policies seem to imply that they don't care to be a good actor for their own users (to the point of not supporting EU users at all because GDPR is "too hard"), so it makes it much harder to assume they will be good actors with respect to all of the conventions around Mastodon data including the classic ROBOTS.TXT.
The Mastodon culture of "public for people, but not for ROBOTS, or only select ROBOTS" is an ancient internet tradition. It's hard to call that naive, when it has decades of history and internet social norms (including good outcomes) behind it. What's naive is thinking that because some major corporations stopped respecting good social norms in the name of increased ad revenue that those norms no longer apply and "anything technically possible is allowable". Read the ROBOTS.TXT in the room and stop being motivated by technology for technology's sake without respecting ethics. Be a good actor in any ecosystem.
You and I agree. I've been on the web since 1996 and the credo you talk about is deeply ingrained in my ethics.
But it's still wishful thinking. We live in the age where AI is so bold as to scrape the crap out of even the largest of other big tech companies without blinking. Without permission, attribution, compensation. So surely a little Mastodon scrape isn't a problem.
There's no need to talk about how unethical it is, we agree. Problem is that it's hard if not impossible to stop. That what I mean by naive.
I don't think it is naive to believe and fight for ethics. I think it takes a lot of courage, especially in a time of disillusionment where you can often feel like the entire industry has lost its mind and put only the most unethical people in charge. I'd rather fight for ethics than say "we can't have nice things because no one is ethical". That takes guts.
I don't think it is is exactly "wishful thinking" to believe that the way we get back to promoting ethics in software is expecting people to behave ethically. We sure are doomed to be disappointed when people turn out to fail us, but that's all the more reason to fight for it, to remind people what ethics are and why a polite society needs them. All of those disappointments are teaching opportunities, if people are open to listening.
(Will Meta learn anything at all from all the Mastodon instances that have pre-emptively blocked them on ethics concerns? Who knows? Mastodon can teach, but it can't force the student to learn. Is it worth Mastodon trying and fighting to teach Meta, no matter what happens? I'd say yes. Ethics are as much a social construct. How we talk about them, how we try to teach them, that says a lot about who we are and what our ethics are.)
I'd rather have even the attempt at ethics than despair that "ethics are technically impossible to enforce". We know ethics can't be programmed, that's why we have to enforce them socially.
The "general public" already can connect to the Fediverse, by making an account on a node in the Fediverse. See, simple. We don't need Meta for that. :)
General public doesn't even know what ferdiverse node is, nor which one to choose. They will choose a simple service from a big corporation with a huge budget on marketing.
Yeah, I do get the EEE angle people are worried about but that should really be halted from the Extend phase onwards if and when it comes up, otherwise people are just going to use the popular one - which will be Threads. It will start with an established userbase. It will start with the marketing Meta can throw at it.
Nobody outside of the HN crowd gives half a fluff about distributed social. They'll use the one that lets them interact with people they know. If that means they can talk cross-instance, sweet, they will. If they can't, Mastodon and ActivityPub in general continues to be a pain that the majority wont bother with.
If that's Mastodon's goal, fair enough. I think it's a bad goal.
Care to elaborate? I haven't had the pleasure of checking Mastodon out. (You're talking about that, right?) And also, which instance are you talking about?
FWIW, I've been using the Fediverse as my primary social media for ~a year, and I've not experienced these technical/social issues being described.
Yes instances occasionally have issues... But I've experienced less outages than on twitter.
Yes there are unsavory types on some servers, but in my experience most are pretty good at defed-ing from them if needed, and you can block/mute individuals.
Picking an instance is a major hurdle. There's no usable feed from the get-go. Following people, especially from other instances, is not intuitive. There's no functional search, no quotes.
Mods are volunteers and can wipe you out at a whim, or just decide to quit the instance. They'll also regularly defederate with other instances, which means they break your followers and whom you follow. There's a perpetual worry of losing everything. In any case, media attached to your content is regularly wiped out, to save costs.
You'll have a feed and see like/boost/whichever icons showing zero. Then you open the individual post and it has non-zero values. Which still is wrong. The original post might have 100 likes but your version shows 15. Not only will it lag, it may never sync as this entirely depends on users on your instance following particular users on other instances.
Worse, the same is true for replies. You will not see most other users replies as those replies are only federated if that user is followed by anyone from your instance. Hence you'll get an original thread with tons of similar replies because users are not seeing the other replies.
I could go on, but almost nothing about it works correctly in the way conventional social media does. It is sorely lacking in basic features and features that are there work poorly.
Second, the cultural part...
Mastodon is basically a community of leftist tech folks, lgbtq, and general misfits. Nothing wrong with that, everybody deserves their place. The problem is that they developed a culture of anti-everything and extreme safetysm.
The bar for hate speech is so low as to exclude most people. They're against any type of commercialization, institutes, influencers. They're against any type of growth or improvement and consider the broken parts of Mastodon features, not shortcomings.
I don't mean to escalate this into a culture war discussion, I'm saying that this attitude is what sabotages Mastodon as a whole from improving and growing, and possibly becoming a much larger and more serious alternative network.
The culture is so cynical and counter productive that even those in the ideological bubble can't take it anymore, this constant in-fighting.
None of this means the entire Mastodon experience is useless. I have used it and it somewhat works. But the more you understand about how it works, the more you realize it can't possibly be a replacement for conventional networks.
It's worth noting that the only time I've payed any attention to twitter is in the last several months, so it's weighted to be worse than it was prior to recent happenings.
The server where I have an account has had downtime twice in the past 200 something days, and had search go down once in that time frame. Occasionally I'll see an update from another server saying "<search|image hosting|replies> are temporarily down", but life goes on fine and they rejoin when they can.
> if Threads becomes too successful for the Fediverse.
I wager most Fediverse users aren't worried about this (at least speaking for myself). The status quo is 2 or 3 big private companies and a few thousand federated alternatives. If Meta betrays the community, things will go back to square one and core functionality of their app will start to falter. They need the community more than the community needs them.
When threads goes live there will be tens of millions of people with existing Meta user profiles entering it overnight. There are currently ~13M Mastodon users, most of which I'm sure are not really active. So depending on how federation into ActivtyPub is set up, it will be like Eternal September x 100. Their content will likely dwarf anything out in Mastodon land. And judging by what I see on Facebook and Instagram, I don't hold out high hopes for the quality of that content or the behaviour of those users.
I'm not worried about it really because I think the ethic of fediverse as such that they will be quickly de-federated. But it won't be fun along the way.
Mastodon doesn't fill your timeline with content from other instances, by default. If 100 million Facebook users federated with Mastodon overnight, 0 organic Meta-related posts would make it into my timeline. Only content reposted from Meta by people I follow would show up.
Defederated or not, Meta will have pretty much zero bearing on the instances outside their bubble.
"They need the community more than the community needs them."
You have to be kidding me. The entire fediverse is little over 1M MAU, almost all of them not monetizable. So...tiny and useless. Threads can launch whilst being fully defederated and instantly become the fediverse.
All of this is true, but none of it contradicts what I said. Meta needs Federation to flaunt the bigwig researchers and developers from other instances. They will eventually build their own stockpile over time, but they wouldn't start with ActivityPub support if their intention was to eventually remove it. If Meta leaves the Fediverse, it goes back to how it is today. That's not a nightmare scenario for most people who are already using Mastodon, and it would put the leverage back into the hands of the users who could coerce Meta users to switch instances for more lax federation.
The ActivityPub ecosystem stands to lose nothing either way. Meta is walking a fine line with the remainder of the community that trusts them, but stands to integrate into a pretty nice system if they pull things off.
There is a very real concern that there will be a flood of hate speech, scams, and ads. Meta has shown themselves to be absolutely terrible at moderation in recent years.
Believe it or not, most Mastodon / Fediverse admins & users aren't interested in taking over the world and having a huge reach. They just want a nice community.
It continues to boggle my mind how so many tech folks just don't seem to understand that "maximum scale" is not everybody's idea of success, and that not everything is built to "take over the world".
It's not pathetic. EEE has been shown time and time again (MS, Google, etc.). Also, Meta is a company known for dubious practices and anti-competitive behavior. So why trust them?
If my current mastodon instance blocks Meta, I will move to a different instance which federates with them. The entire point of federation in my eyes is that it lets me talk to as many people as possible.
Sure, that's your prerogative, federation broadens your reach. But what's the point if it only opens the door to toxicity and negativity? It's about meaningful connections, not just more of them.
Another thing I like about Mastodon is the lack of an algorithm. I only see posts from people I explicitly choose to follow (or posts those people explicitly choose to boost).
I do not plan to follow people who are excessively toxic or negative. If Threads launches, and 100% of its users are toxic, I will not follow anyone on Threads. But that seems unlikely to me.
Edit: I suppose it's true that people I don't follow can still reply to my posts. Idk, I suppose it's possible that federating with Threads would make my replies super toxic. But, like, let's see how the community develops first.
I have been a rather happy user the last few months but the last couple of weeks it's turned pretty narsty; downloaded my data and turned off my main instance account, and I'm waiting for the schism to happen before I go back in.
I have zero issue with Meta using ActivityPub, cause whatever they try, it makes them at least somewhat permeable in theory. I do have zero intention of interacting with them on any level though.
It won't last -- if it even launches with this feature -- pretty sure.
As others have pointed out, most hosts will simply de-federate them pretty quickly anyways, and then it will become a useless feature that they turn off.
I suspect it will be one-way anyways, to capitalize on the existing content produced by Mastodon users out there already while they bootstrap. There's no way they'd offer their own content up into the fediverse without the ability to tie it to ads and engagement.
Given the cold reception they've gotten, it will be interesting to see if this feature even makes launch.
That sounds logical. Federation without conditions would make no sense at all for Meta. You could then run an ad-free Threads copy, create any client you want, easily train your AI on their content.
Surely if such deals materialize, many idealistic Mastodon instances will defederate with Meta. A few big Mastodon instances might not. Next, the idealistic Mastodon instances will defederate with the Meta-compatible Mastodon instances.
Which...makes large Mastodon instances pretty pointless. They'll be largely isolated from the rest of the Mastodon part of the fediverse. They can interact with Threads users, but in that case...why wouldn't users simply use Threads?
Yeah talk about good old days. Pidgin or Adium (or Finch, in the terminal), I could have google chat, facebook chat, and even IRC in one app. Throw OTR plugin on that & I we had end to end chat encryption over google & facebook. Very sad day when they shut these down.
Agreed. As an interesting look at the human side of technology decisions, Google dropped XMPP federation the year after I graduated high school, leaving me extremely isolated from all my friends once we went our separate ways.
So they allow Threads-to-Mastodon, but they key question is whether they allow Mastodon-to-Threads. The former is just a way to recruit users to their platform, while the latter gives access to their platform without being a user.
Did not expect Fediverse integration from Meta.
[1] https://9to5google.com/2023/07/03/threads-instagram-app-coun...