I don’t understand what Meta will gain from participating in the fediverse?
Their ultimate goal is to make money of Threads and I just don’t see how encouraging an open federation will help them do it?
Even 3Eing the fediverse will not do them much good as they already have sooo much traffic already that killing the fediverse will not make a serious change in their figures.
But OTOH it does seem like Threads is net positive for the fediverse ATM. Even if all current denizens of the fediverse will block Threads, there is a large group of people that are exposed to the concept of “fediverse” for the fist time and some of them will want to learn more. This is a good thing.
Anyway, I don’t know why they are doing it, but I’m cautiously glad they did it.
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
They can do that without federating. In the first 7 hours of Threads being open, they got 10 million users. There’s nothing additional they can do to “extinguish” the fediverse simply by being inside it.
Any fediverse users who prefer Threads are going to go there anyway - remember, you have to create a new account on each server already! And anyone who detests Meta is going to stay in the fediverse regardless. They’re here now, when the fediverse is minuscule. Nothing Meta can do is going to make the fediverse smaller.
They can flood the fediverse with mediocre content, ads via posts, and use both to scrape replies to create even more data about users. They can do this through existing instances In theory, but it would be far easier to federated and subscribe to instances to pull in the data to their own instance and being easier means it is more likely.
Making the fediverse bigger to harvest more data is a net loss for the fediverse.
I’ll summarize what the CEO of Instagram said in an interview on the Hardfork podcast this morning. Lots of hot takes here based on everyone’s rightful skepticism of Meta, but I think it’s worth understanding what their stated plan is.
First, the CEO said he thinks federation is the future, that social media in general is going to be increasingly moving that way in the next 5 years. This gives them a chance to take a big early swing in the space and get some learning in. Remeber, as much as a lot of fediverse people are worried about Threads joining, Threads is also worried about all of you who are already on the Fediverse. Part of what they are selling is a sane and we’ll moderated social platform that regular people can use, and federating is a challenge to their moderation. They are trying to work out how they can moderate content coming into the Threads server and shown to those users without having to defederate entire servers.
Second, and similar to number one, they expect that content creators, influencers, etc will come to expect account/follower portability as decentralization of social media becomes more widespread. This one is huge, and it’s one of their main selling points. They are telling celebrities that hey you can join Threads and it will be safe and sane, but if five years down the line you hate it, you can just pack up your account and move to another platform and keep all your followers. This is a really big deal, celebrities, influencers, journalists, etc spend years building followings and the main thing holding a lot back from jumping off Twitter for example is that when they go to a new platform they start with zero followers. Joining a platform where you are assured that you can jump ship without having to start at zero everytime is a huuuge selling point, and the reason they’ve been able to get celebrities on as early adopters.
Finally, the CEO said ads will probably come some day, but they are not focused on monetization at all right now, but just building a sustainable platform that is fun to use. They expect a lot of initial interest, and then for a bunch of users to get bored and leave, and then to work on slow growth overtime.
That’s straight from the horse’s mouth (via my memory). Was he being perfectly honest, probably not. For example, he said they made the decision to push Threads out now before it was fully EU complaint because EU compliance would take months and he was afraid they could miss their window of opportunity. He wouldn’t explicitly say Twitter has gone to shit and their going after that market, but that’s pretty clearly what he was alluding to. Also, keep in mind as a corporate representative all his statements can get the company in trouble for misleading shareholders (see Musks “going private at 420 a share” tweet for example), so he’s not able to outright lie about the company’s plans. So I’d take this all with a grain of salt, but I wouldn’t run immediately to conspiracy theories.
That is fair. I mostly just think its interesting that he was fairly upfront about it. Meta is a for profit business, so its not unexpected. I do think it will be interesting though because they seem pretty committed to account portability, and if they stick with that then that puts some pressure on them to maintain a good user experience. Even all the talk about embrace, extend, extinguish, all starts with the assumption that Threads will be so big it will make changes and force other instances to either comply or get defederated and the assumption is that users would flock to Threads from Mastadon rather than the other way around. Personally, I expect Meta’s move here is going to increase interest in Activitypub and more projects are going to be launched on it, both from startups and established big tech. I think its equally plausible that the better analogy is AOL opening up to the world wide web and HTML and getting swallowed in the process. There is a lot of fear about Threads, but I’m not convinced this is a doomsday scenario for the fediverse, I’m personally cautiously optimistic.
It’s nice to see a (cautiously) optimistic voice on this subject for a change, although I think I feel less optimistic than you. But I do think there’s the potential for it to be mutually beneficial so long as Meta remains non-malevolent.
I think there a few key differences that mean the Google XMPP situation can be used as a direct parallel, too. Google didn’t really see much benefit from staying federated, because all federation did with live messaging was mean that non-Google users were benefitting from Google’s users without being monetised by Google. When Google’s users lost access to their non-Google contacts, the vast majority of them just carried on as usual, meaning Google continued monetising them as usual and it was only beneficial for Google as a company.
I don’t think that’s the case with Threads. Meta will continue to benefit from federating with well-moderated content in the future because, for Meta, it’s content that’s being created for free by another platform that they can still monetise. And if it’s well-moderated content, that’s effectively free moderation, too - something Meta would normally have to employ people for.
More interest in Activity Pub from other big players would definitely be a good thing, if only to make sure no one company has a monopoly. It would potentially have disadvantages, of course, but I think if tech giants are going to get involved, I’d rather multiple get involved to keep things somewhat competitive and (hopefully) drive consumer-friendly ideas.
I appreciate your take and pretty much agree with everything you said. I’ve seen the XMPP example thrown around a lot, but the distinction you made with the benefit that Threads gets from federation compared with what Google got is spot on. I’d add that Threads is currently selling the account portability piece as a major draw for public figures warry of needing to rebuild followings on new platforms every couple of years when their current platform goes to shit. That is another benefit to keeping federation, theoretically anyway.
I really like that the fediverse is kind of in a utopian stage right now, people are volunteering to spin up servers and putting their time and energy into making them run smoothly for everyone, people are pitching in with donations, the community as a whole is full of positive early adopters excited about what this could be. Hard to predict where things go from here. Maybe Meta comes in and destroys everything like some fear. Maybe tech firms come and compete and push the small non-profits and volunteers out, and the fediverse just becomes competing big tech platforms. Maybe the tech firms and volunteers/non-profits can kind of coexist, something like the FOSS community where you have some bigger firms making money (Redhat/Canonical) working with volunteers and foundations. Even if things stayed volunteer driven, there is also the risk that an individual instance could get so big that it starts demanding changes from other instances to continue federation or throwing up targeted ads. I think with the Twitter and Reddit fiascos, Tik Tok has begun the enshitification process, we’re entering a new post-centeralized social media world, but what that world ultimately looks like I don’t know.
I’m cautiously optimistic for two reasons: 1) Threads is bringing more general attention to Activitypub, which is positive in general but especially with Meta making a big bet with their money and what’s left of their reputation, and 2) Threads is here, its impractical to think the existing fediverse community is going to erect a giant wallaround them, so I might as well hope for the best cause this shit is happening.
Their main goal is to kill twitter. Their second goal is to skirt antimonopoly laws when they succeed to kill twitter. Their third and optional goal is to starve twitter-like fediverse apps from users. They has loads of resource, if they can come with good and familiar ui without usual growing pains that fediverse has (server overloaded, client not ready), many non tech savy users will never look beyond threads. Thus robbing mastodon, calckey, pleroma, etc from potential users and attention.
Examples of the “do’s” - Gatekeeper platforms will have to:
allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations
allow their business users to access the data that they generate in their use of the gatekeeper’s platform
provide companies advertising on their platform with the tools and information necessary for advertisers and publishers to carry out their own independent verification of their advertisements hosted by the gatekeeper
allow their business users to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the gatekeeper’s platform
The interoperability is the big one. The Fediverse gives a way for Meta to be in compliance, and they have an interest in maintaining competition.
Yeah that’s a possibility. They could do something like “ohh too bad Killer Feature X is looking so badly on Mastodon. On Threads it will look so much better”. Essentially using fedi as a crappy demo for Threads. That sounds like a typical business plan to me.
If the fediverse wants to retain its independence from Meta, the content producers of significance need to be convinced of the value of being in control of their brand while still having access to the user base of Threads. If the content producers go to Threads, the fediverse becomes irrelevant.
Exactly. Ease of use can truly impact the growth of a platform.
Like, I’m sure most people on Lemmy are a bit tech savvy, but the overall user just want to make 1 account and be able to access everything.
Right now, Threads is doing a “good” job by integrating themselves with Instagram. Don’t even need to create a new account if you have Insta, just pop in and start using it.
I think people around here have a vastly overestimated opinion of how important the fediverse is to other social media sites.
Within the first 7 hours of Threads, they had 10 million users.
Meta absolutely DGAF about us. They don’t have to. Using ActivityPub is at worst an anti-monopoly play. But by the time they turn on federation, all of the people who were going to leave the fediverse for Threads will likely already have done so.
This is what people aren’t getting. The fediverse, as it is now, is irrelevant to Meta’s plans for Threads. Meta views the fediverse as an inducement to get creators to join Threads. Per The Verge:
As Mosseri puts it, this is a move designed to appease creators who have grown increasingly wary of relying on the whims of centralized social media companies. “I think we might be a more compelling platform for creators, particularly for the newer creators who are more and more savvy, if we are a place where you don’t have to feel like you have to trust us forever,” he says.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
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Embrace, extend, extinguish
They can do that without federating. In the first 7 hours of Threads being open, they got 10 million users. There’s nothing additional they can do to “extinguish” the fediverse simply by being inside it.
Any fediverse users who prefer Threads are going to go there anyway - remember, you have to create a new account on each server already! And anyone who detests Meta is going to stay in the fediverse regardless. They’re here now, when the fediverse is minuscule. Nothing Meta can do is going to make the fediverse smaller.
They can flood the fediverse with mediocre content, ads via posts, and use both to scrape replies to create even more data about users. They can do this through existing instances In theory, but it would be far easier to federated and subscribe to instances to pull in the data to their own instance and being easier means it is more likely.
Making the fediverse bigger to harvest more data is a net loss for the fediverse.
I’ll summarize what the CEO of Instagram said in an interview on the Hardfork podcast this morning. Lots of hot takes here based on everyone’s rightful skepticism of Meta, but I think it’s worth understanding what their stated plan is.
First, the CEO said he thinks federation is the future, that social media in general is going to be increasingly moving that way in the next 5 years. This gives them a chance to take a big early swing in the space and get some learning in. Remeber, as much as a lot of fediverse people are worried about Threads joining, Threads is also worried about all of you who are already on the Fediverse. Part of what they are selling is a sane and we’ll moderated social platform that regular people can use, and federating is a challenge to their moderation. They are trying to work out how they can moderate content coming into the Threads server and shown to those users without having to defederate entire servers.
Second, and similar to number one, they expect that content creators, influencers, etc will come to expect account/follower portability as decentralization of social media becomes more widespread. This one is huge, and it’s one of their main selling points. They are telling celebrities that hey you can join Threads and it will be safe and sane, but if five years down the line you hate it, you can just pack up your account and move to another platform and keep all your followers. This is a really big deal, celebrities, influencers, journalists, etc spend years building followings and the main thing holding a lot back from jumping off Twitter for example is that when they go to a new platform they start with zero followers. Joining a platform where you are assured that you can jump ship without having to start at zero everytime is a huuuge selling point, and the reason they’ve been able to get celebrities on as early adopters.
Finally, the CEO said ads will probably come some day, but they are not focused on monetization at all right now, but just building a sustainable platform that is fun to use. They expect a lot of initial interest, and then for a bunch of users to get bored and leave, and then to work on slow growth overtime.
That’s straight from the horse’s mouth (via my memory). Was he being perfectly honest, probably not. For example, he said they made the decision to push Threads out now before it was fully EU complaint because EU compliance would take months and he was afraid they could miss their window of opportunity. He wouldn’t explicitly say Twitter has gone to shit and their going after that market, but that’s pretty clearly what he was alluding to. Also, keep in mind as a corporate representative all his statements can get the company in trouble for misleading shareholders (see Musks “going private at 420 a share” tweet for example), so he’s not able to outright lie about the company’s plans. So I’d take this all with a grain of salt, but I wouldn’t run immediately to conspiracy theories.
most sites do not start out shittified, they become ENshittified.
That is fair. I mostly just think its interesting that he was fairly upfront about it. Meta is a for profit business, so its not unexpected. I do think it will be interesting though because they seem pretty committed to account portability, and if they stick with that then that puts some pressure on them to maintain a good user experience. Even all the talk about embrace, extend, extinguish, all starts with the assumption that Threads will be so big it will make changes and force other instances to either comply or get defederated and the assumption is that users would flock to Threads from Mastadon rather than the other way around. Personally, I expect Meta’s move here is going to increase interest in Activitypub and more projects are going to be launched on it, both from startups and established big tech. I think its equally plausible that the better analogy is AOL opening up to the world wide web and HTML and getting swallowed in the process. There is a lot of fear about Threads, but I’m not convinced this is a doomsday scenario for the fediverse, I’m personally cautiously optimistic.
It’s nice to see a (cautiously) optimistic voice on this subject for a change, although I think I feel less optimistic than you. But I do think there’s the potential for it to be mutually beneficial so long as Meta remains non-malevolent.
I think there a few key differences that mean the Google XMPP situation can be used as a direct parallel, too. Google didn’t really see much benefit from staying federated, because all federation did with live messaging was mean that non-Google users were benefitting from Google’s users without being monetised by Google. When Google’s users lost access to their non-Google contacts, the vast majority of them just carried on as usual, meaning Google continued monetising them as usual and it was only beneficial for Google as a company.
I don’t think that’s the case with Threads. Meta will continue to benefit from federating with well-moderated content in the future because, for Meta, it’s content that’s being created for free by another platform that they can still monetise. And if it’s well-moderated content, that’s effectively free moderation, too - something Meta would normally have to employ people for.
More interest in Activity Pub from other big players would definitely be a good thing, if only to make sure no one company has a monopoly. It would potentially have disadvantages, of course, but I think if tech giants are going to get involved, I’d rather multiple get involved to keep things somewhat competitive and (hopefully) drive consumer-friendly ideas.
I appreciate your take and pretty much agree with everything you said. I’ve seen the XMPP example thrown around a lot, but the distinction you made with the benefit that Threads gets from federation compared with what Google got is spot on. I’d add that Threads is currently selling the account portability piece as a major draw for public figures warry of needing to rebuild followings on new platforms every couple of years when their current platform goes to shit. That is another benefit to keeping federation, theoretically anyway.
I really like that the fediverse is kind of in a utopian stage right now, people are volunteering to spin up servers and putting their time and energy into making them run smoothly for everyone, people are pitching in with donations, the community as a whole is full of positive early adopters excited about what this could be. Hard to predict where things go from here. Maybe Meta comes in and destroys everything like some fear. Maybe tech firms come and compete and push the small non-profits and volunteers out, and the fediverse just becomes competing big tech platforms. Maybe the tech firms and volunteers/non-profits can kind of coexist, something like the FOSS community where you have some bigger firms making money (Redhat/Canonical) working with volunteers and foundations. Even if things stayed volunteer driven, there is also the risk that an individual instance could get so big that it starts demanding changes from other instances to continue federation or throwing up targeted ads. I think with the Twitter and Reddit fiascos, Tik Tok has begun the enshitification process, we’re entering a new post-centeralized social media world, but what that world ultimately looks like I don’t know.
I’m cautiously optimistic for two reasons: 1) Threads is bringing more general attention to Activitypub, which is positive in general but especially with Meta making a big bet with their money and what’s left of their reputation, and 2) Threads is here, its impractical to think the existing fediverse community is going to erect a giant wallaround them, so I might as well hope for the best cause this shit is happening.
Their main goal is to kill twitter. Their second goal is to skirt antimonopoly laws when they succeed to kill twitter. Their third and optional goal is to starve twitter-like fediverse apps from users. They has loads of resource, if they can come with good and familiar ui without usual growing pains that fediverse has (server overloaded, client not ready), many non tech savy users will never look beyond threads. Thus robbing mastodon, calckey, pleroma, etc from potential users and attention.
They participate because the Digital Markets Act is forcing them to: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en
The interoperability is the big one. The Fediverse gives a way for Meta to be in compliance, and they have an interest in maintaining competition.
I think they’re trying to get people off Fedi and into Threads.
Yeah that’s a possibility. They could do something like “ohh too bad Killer Feature X is looking so badly on Mastodon. On Threads it will look so much better”. Essentially using fedi as a crappy demo for Threads. That sounds like a typical business plan to me.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It’s the old Microsoft playbook that Google is trying to pull with Chrome.
@jcrabapple @ComptitiveSubset EEE. Embrace, extend and extinguish.
Lol not gonna work
“Mastodon is so hard to understand, at least Threads is easy.”
Once people start saying that Meta will be in charge of the fediverse.
If the fediverse wants to retain its independence from Meta, the content producers of significance need to be convinced of the value of being in control of their brand while still having access to the user base of Threads. If the content producers go to Threads, the fediverse becomes irrelevant.
The fediverse is and always will be more than microblogging instances like Threads and Mastodon.
Exactly. Ease of use can truly impact the growth of a platform.
Like, I’m sure most people on Lemmy are a bit tech savvy, but the overall user just want to make 1 account and be able to access everything.
Right now, Threads is doing a “good” job by integrating themselves with Instagram. Don’t even need to create a new account if you have Insta, just pop in and start using it.
I think people around here have a vastly overestimated opinion of how important the fediverse is to other social media sites.
Within the first 7 hours of Threads, they had 10 million users.
Meta absolutely DGAF about us. They don’t have to. Using ActivityPub is at worst an anti-monopoly play. But by the time they turn on federation, all of the people who were going to leave the fediverse for Threads will likely already have done so.
This is what people aren’t getting. The fediverse, as it is now, is irrelevant to Meta’s plans for Threads. Meta views the fediverse as an inducement to get creators to join Threads. Per The Verge:
As Mosseri puts it, this is a move designed to appease creators who have grown increasingly wary of relying on the whims of centralized social media companies. “I think we might be a more compelling platform for creators, particularly for the newer creators who are more and more savvy, if we are a place where you don’t have to feel like you have to trust us forever,” he says.