A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.
However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don’t have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.
What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it’d be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.
What actions can we take to deal with Threads?
As the fediverse grows, there will inevitably be more centralized instances. Every big tech corp may want to start their own instance, similar to how most tech corps provide their own mail services.
There are millions of email service providers, but Gmail and Outlook are synonymous to email for a large amount of people.
Defederating with Meta and Tumblr is like Protonmail blocking every mail from Gmail. You just cripple yourself and make your instance useless.
Every user on threads has something in common. They were stupid enough to join threads.
I’m depriving myself of nothing by defederating that mess.
Threads is a Twitter competitor. Same applies to Mastodon.
Twitter is only useful because companies, celebrities amd politicians embrace it. Nobody cares about ordinary Twitter users. Twitter is a platform for networking with people in the industry and announcing stuff to customers.
Mastodon right now is not an alternative to Twitter, because there is practically nobody important there.
Threads has better chances to overcome this and has already in a few hours pulled more VIPs onto their platform, than Mastodon in multiple years.
This seems right. So what do you propose doing?
I am pro-fediverse, so I guess making Mastodon atleast as easy to use as Threads is a must.
If you look at statistics, Mastodon always gains a massive amount of users, when Twitter does something stupid. Most of these also return back to Twitter, the moment they realize, that Mastodon has no VIPs.
If Threads integrates well with ActivityPub, then people on Mastodon will be more likely to stay, because Threads gives fediverse users access to the VIPs, that they used Twitter for in the first place. This stops people from leaving Mastodon in the short term.
In the long term Mastodon needs to advertise itself to younger people, because nowadays this is the only way for new social media platforms to establish themselves.
That’s how TikTok, SnapChat and Instagram became popular. This would make Mastodon fresh, while Twitter would transform into a graveyard like facebook.
Also having more tech companies, media orgs, cultural orgs, universities and maybe even governments host their instances, would make the federated aspect stronger and the whole fediverse more scalable.
Interesting. In this debate I keep going back and forth, mainly because of the XMPP precedent, but I basically agree with your pragmatic priors.
Your last point is so true. Actually I can’t help feeling a bit of schadenfreude about all those well-meaning organizations and VIPs and whole governments that went all-in on proprietary platforms and now find themselves on super uncool sinking ships or controversy-laden fiascos. I mean, what was some regional government or university doing on Twitter in the first place?! Same thing for Whatsapp literally replacing phone numbers in many countries. I mean, this is a single private company FFS, you have no control over anything, yet apparently most people and organizations still cannot see the problem - incredible. This is why we always need protocols and standards. It was obvious all along. Anyway, forgive the rant, I agree with your take.
What XMPP precident? XMPP is great and I use it everyday. Is that what you’re talking about?
Well, either you must use it to talk to yourself or your contacts must all be in a tech bubble. Unless I am terribly mistaken, an arbitrary XMPP client cannot be used to talk to people on the proprietary networks where most of them are these days.
I use it to IM people on http://sine.space among others regularly. Many of whom are completely non-techy. The problem with people pretending that XMPP was embraced extended and extinguished. Is that it was never the case. If Google killed XMPP. Then it must have also killed AOL instant messenger, MSN instant messenger, ICQ, etc. It didn’t. But no one uses them anymore hardly either.
The truth of the matter is that no one used Google talk for XMPP. Other than mostly techie people who are already using XMPP. It’s base of use definitely increased when people started using Google talk. But only technically. And when Google stop supporting it. It technically went back to normal. Where it is now. The fact is it was good but never popular. And other more featured services replaced it and all the services like it. But it’s still exists today quietly. And in a lot of places people would never suspect it still.
I think one of the biggest things we can do is identify ways to fight bots. One thing has become clear to me, and that’s that Reddit and Twitter are stuffed to the gills with bots and professional trolls. I haven’t seen a small fraction of the rage engagement here that I did on Reddit, and I’m guessing that the reason alt-right and other extremist messages echo so hard on these platforms is that they really drive rage engagement. These platforms eat it up, because any engagement is good engagement. I worry that Threads will represent an absolute Tsunami of bot-driven garbage and ragebait being broadcast to federated servers.
FSVO VIP.
Come on what is this elitism, almost everyone has an Instagram, it’s not that huge of a leap to just press the button that says threats, it’s not a sign of stupidity.
Seriously there is some heavy gatekeeping and elitism going around whenever there is a conversation around META
for real, the people “stupid enough to join Threads” are my friends and family and they’ve already grown up in a world where they had to sell their soul to capitalism. so what’s one more shitty TOS if it means they can continue following their friends? they don’t have any idea that there’s any community-maintained alternatives cause they aren’t computer science scholars. that doesn’t make them stupid :/ (not that they would see Mastodon as an alternative anyway since they just want a way to keep in touch with friends and mainstream news and, for them, those things just aren’t on Mastodon yet)
You make it sound like listening to the type of person who uses Threads is useful. Weird.