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As you've probably heard, Threads (a fairly new social network from Facebook's parent company Meta) is testing integration with the fediverse. Depending on how you look at it, it's a great opportunity, a huge threat, or both!
Back in May and June, when Threads' first announced their plans, there were quite a few polls on Mastodon about people's reactions, most showing opinions split roughly equally. How do people feel today?
Definitely not. The same reason back then as it is now. Namely: I don't trust Meta to not try to destroy the fediverse
I'm skeptical anything good will come out of it, but I'm glad if I'm wrong. Meta is about making money. The fediverse is a direct competitor to everything and anything they do. I don't think Meta is interested in integrating with the fediverse. I think they want to dominate the fediverse. But that's just me.
Capitalism believes selfishness is a virtue. And capitalists believe they are a benefit to society by being as selfish as possible. Anything good that comes from them is purely accidental.
That said, them connecting to the federverse is a much bigger risk for threads than it is for the federverse. We came here purposely to not be subject to them. They have no power over here. And next to none of us will ever be enticed away from here to there. However they cannot compete with the currently failing Twitter. And they need the dedicated long-term engagement. They have decent numbers. But only because they're pulling from a pre-existing user base. That isn't really interacting.
The main thing is to not get stuck in a self-destructive rhetoric cycle. Like people did with Google talk and XMPP. No one used Google talk for XMPP. It was just a nice side effect for a while that they interoperated. When Google closed it off they did not kill XMPP. XMPP still exists, and those of us that used it were weirdos in the first place who still used it afterwards. Threads may have a little something to offer. But we will lose nothing if they leave.
The fediverse is a direct competitor to everything and anything they do. I don’t think Meta is interested in integrating with the fediverse.
Right and this is really all that even needs to be said. There is nothing meta can do or say that will make this not true and there is no possibility that overtime meta won't make decisions according to this power relation.
The future fediverse we all day dream about when we are in an optimistic mood is literally a catastrophic fail state for a corporate social media company like meta. We see the plot of a happy uplifting family action movie, meta sees a horrific slasher movie.
Threat.
Whatever the stated reasons for joining the fediverse might be, the actual reason is to enhance data scrping capabilities.
It's silly to think they can't scrape data from where they are though.
What's to stop them from starting a tiny instance, getting all the data, and just keeping quiet about it?
The threads people are already happy to have given up that data, and if meta becomes a problem, defederate from it, or find an instance that isn't federated with meta threads.
Which of the above sentences is supposed to make me think that it is impossible for Meta to scrape more privacy destroying data, if they go all in on the fediverse?
I still feel strongly against it.
I’ll possibly end up leaving the Fediverse and finding a nice forum where I know corpos will never ruin.
No need to leave the fediverse, just join instances which plan to block threads
Nah won’t work.
Threads will kill content from non-Threads users.
I'm so disappointed that it isn't an overwhelming majority of votes against federating with Meta. How do most people not realize this is just their chance to take advantage of the fediverse? And like haven't we heard enough bad things about Meta to avoid them?
I am extremely against federating with Threads.
People in support of federating with threads keep saying we don't need to worry about meta trying to extend, embrace and extinguish the fediverse because the software and architecture of the fediverse makes it impervious. In other words, technology will defend us from politics, money and power.
It is a categorical error in logic to think that a technology can solve problems of the type: politics, money or power.
WE have to solve those problems by understanding how history repeats itself and how large corporations fundamentally relate to publicly shared resources irrespective of what the CEOs say or even think themselves. We have to realize you can't write a computer function that will stop a massive corporation from corrupting a collective human endeavor. Only humans can do that by organizing to collectively reject the membership of the massive corporation from the community around the collective human endeavor. As soon as you let meta in the door, you have lost a very important ideological power struggle over the fediverse's identity.
To those of you who argue that being against federating with meta/threads is elitist and comes from a desire of not wanting to let "normies" in who will dilute fediverse culture... I don't want to let massive corporations in precisely because I think it fosters an environment where a diversity of people, specifically minorities, are not made to feel safe or welcome. Most of the cool people worth actually talking to on the fediverse came here because they didn't feel safe or welcome on a corporate social network owned by a massive corporation.
If your response to that is well but what about all the normies that the massive corporation could rope into the fediverse that the tiny, pathetic fediverse will never reach? I return to my original point. This isn't a struggle over programs, code, software... it is a struggle of politics, money and power and we have to relate to it that way. To let a massive corporation into the fediverse that basically has the resources of an entire rich nation and think it won't utterly exploit and derail the future of the fediverse is absurd. If a company is publicly traded on the stockmarket, it is essentially obligated legally to do so in the pursuit of potential profit for its investors. We can't get the reach a massive corporation could give us without also fundamentally giving up what makes the fediverse a better alternative than corporate social media. It is a deal with the devil no matter what way you spin it.
Great write up. I really hope that we can pull this off and keep Meta out of the majority of the Fediverse
Their goal is pretty standard affair.
isn’t threads already several times larger than the whole of the “fediverse”?
100 millions users of Threads against ~1.5M users of the whole Fedi. It won't be a toxic relationship for sure.
I don't like meta as a company.
But I don't want to exclude a bunch of people just because they decided to use a server owned by meta. It's not like the server is a community dedicated to hurting people or promoting hate speech or something, and I don't want to punish people just because they're not savvy enough to understand the problems with meta. Let them federate and just don't follow any of them if you're not interested in any of them.
Defederating isn't going to benefit us or hurt meta, it's just gonna hurt the people who use threads.
But I don’t want to exclude a bunch of people just because they decided to use a server owned by meta.
I do.
You make the fediverse a worse place, if your default is to arbitrarily exclude and gatekeep against people unlike you, as it seems to be.
The people on Tumblr are entirely unlike me … but I have no issues federating with Tumblr.
You might want to consider why this is the case.
Your word choice is just bizarre. Nobody would be excluded, they'd only have to make a profile on a different, normal server. And nobody would be "hurt" by not having access to Lemmy's memes about Linux and similar stuff.
just don’t follow any of them if you’re not interested in any of them
Except that theoretically my "All" feed would still be full of garbage-tier content that people typically expect and post on Meta's services, and that userbase with its same mindset would eventually spill over into the communities that I do follow too.
Your response isn't self consistent.
they'd only have to make a profile on a different, normal server my "All" feed would still be full of garbage-tier content that people typically expect and post on Meta's services
If they make a profile on a normal server then your feed will be full of that same content you don't want. You're trying to exclude users, not meta itself.
Besides, you keep taking as though they're federating with Lemmy. They're not, they're federating with mastodon. Having mastodon posts show up automatically in your Lemmy feeds is unusual. Kbin, maybe.
Defederating isn't going to benefit us or hurt meta, it's just gonna hurt the people who use threads.
...Good. they should move their happy asses to a normal, non-ghoul of a corporation run mastodon server, if it pains them so.
I hope they federate
why do you hope that?
I hate Reddit and Twitter both so I want the Fediverse to take off
Facebook/Threads will not be a good federation partner, same cesspool as Twitter.
Meta are war criminals. Period.
If you support Meta attaching to the fediverse, you are welcoming war criminals and their quislings to becoming part of the fediverse.
I sincerely hope most of us in the fediverse are better than that or I'm going to have to search for a new social media home.
Meta has been a willing tool for enabling war crimes, genocide, political manipulation/propaganda, and brutal authoritarianism all across the globe.
Meta has a very bad track record, but on the other hand I would be happy to be able to follow famous people that are only on Threads from my privacy-respecting services.
I see Threads federation something like an RSS feed. It's not inherently bad per se.
More awareness is always good to take. That's said my own personal instance will defederate because damn meta
I don't see how it's a threat. They can't take over the whole federation.
Sure they can. Like Google took over XMPP.
The fediverse isnt a competition and nor we we should try to replace gaint companies(even tho that it would be great) rather stay as a free alternative to those platforms.
Was no and still no. BTW, here's me viewing a Threads profile from mastodon.world on Moshidon
It can be both a "good" opportunity and bad but given the way Meta had to change its name to Meta after getting into trouble with running its platform to encourage fascism in national election outcomes ... I think it's safe to say the good that could possibly come of the federation does not outweigh the probable bad. I don't agree with anything Zuckerfuck touches being anything close to reasonable to work with. Meta/Facebook's track record isn't something to ignore.
I don't care either way, but I hope they'd be welcome as long as they kept their instance cleaned of the kind of things other instances have been defederated for.
If meta wants all the data there are plenty of other ways to get it, pretending the fediverse is an impenetrable shield is silly. And maybe more people will learn about the fediverse in this way.