If you take a look at their CEOs fediverse acct, you'll see he's pretty caught up in the mastodon hype. He's coming at the whole thing from the perspective of mastodon being the platform, instead of the weird disjointed fediverse. People have tried explaining things he's not understanding fully, and he kinda brushes it off. I think even in a decentralized network, there are some ppl who still need some centralized platform to focus in on.
I actually come at this from an open standards pov and believe in the power of interoperable systems on a shared network. I built a startup in the early 90s called Paper which launched a 3D plugin for Netscape called WebFX built on an open standard called VRML that held the promise to create a 3D web. Paper was acquired by Netscape and then I worked on a bunch of open standards like XML, HTML 4, RSS, etc. Then I started a new company called Tellme which was the forerunner to Siri and Alexa built on VoiceXML, an open standard that held the promise to create a voice web. As cool as that work was, an open voice web or open 3d web never happened. These days at Flipboard I'm focused on ActivityPub and I see an incredible amount of diversity and decentralized innovation happening here in such a way that the open social web could very well happen. And that would be good for everyone. But I've fought these battles before and lost enough to know that this is not a sure thing. There are many twists and turns along the way and I am hoping to do my part to navigate those in way which is a win for good acting members of society, non-profits and businesses.
re: Mastodon I see it as the largest use case of the social web today. But there are many others as you well know. We just stood up a peertube instance today for example and I love my pixelfed account. I have been following kbin and Lemmy with lots of interest though reluctant to sign up and engage mostly cause I am worried about spreading myself too thin across all these amazing activitypub services.
re: your broader point. I agree that most people have no appreciation for the fediverse beyond mastodon. And people get confused when they think of Mastodon in terms grounded in the centralized model used for how social media mostly works today. It reminds me of how people thought AOL was the best way to be online and that the internet was super confusing and just for scientists.
There will be a lot of education and evangelism and, more importantly, new apps and use cases that will be needed to make this vision of an open social web actually happen. I'm just happy to be doing my part to help.
re: Mastodon I see it as the largest use case of the social web today. But there are many others as you well know. We just stood up a peertube instance today for example and I love my pixelfed account. I have been following kbin and Lemmy with lots of interest though reluctant to sign up and engage mostly cause I am worried about spreading myself too thin across all these amazing activitypub services.
This was my point. You shouldn't need an account on all of these services. You should be able to interact from your single Flipboard account. But its likely that, like most new fediverse services, you were testing mostly (or probably solely) against Mastodon. Despite Flipboard having more in common with link aggregators like kbin/lemmy, yall went for mastodon compatibility first.
A lot of people are worried about large orgs/companies like Flipboard/Meta joining the fediverse and controlling it, but Mastodon itself has been in that position for a long time. It's controlled and limited the fediverse for a while and people keep reinforcing its control instead of expanding on the fediverse's plurality.
I agree with you that the fediverse’s plurality is crucial to reinforce right now. This is why integrated with Pixelfed and promoted it to our users early this year. We will be able to introduce people to other services across the fediverse once we’ve completed our activitypub cutover.
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568 we have to preemptively defederate with any corporation! The fediverse must always stay small and never improve other companies. The vision is for open technology that few can use, right? I'm just worried that if Flipboard helps make the fediverse more appealing by providing more content for our users, that they can pull a fast one and defederate from us later, and then all of our users will leave and go to Flipboard instead! The only way to prevent that from happening is to make sure they never hear about Flipboard in the first place. Please reference any arguments used for defederating from Meta if you need more "sky is falling" arguments to whip you into a frenzy of senseless fear.
I respect your choice to defederate. That's of course one of the first principles here.
Re: flipboard, we're completely rewriting out backend around activitypub. There is no turning back. We, as they say, have burned the ships. We will now live or die based on how we conduct ourselves in the fediverse.
@Mmccue I was being sarcastic, I think the fediverse is about improving how people use social media- not driving all existing social media extinct. The idea that people would be unhappy that enormous companies are adopting the fediverse, which inherently loosens their grip on their audience and relinquished some of their power- it seems insane. Pre-emptive defederation seems insane.
Ah. I see. Thanks for the clarification. I agree with you. The fact that this is happening at all is really quite amazing. The ultimate irony is that if Elon didn’t destroy Twitter we wouldn’t be seeing the rise of the social web right now.
I came to the Threadiverse because Reddit was closing its APIs and building the walls higher around its garden.
I will be supremely disappointed if the Threadiverse collectively turns around and does the same thing.
Instances should be defederated when they do something harmful. Preemptively defederating is counterproductive, it gives Meta no incentive to do things right.
Yep, the Reddit metaphor really backfired. If Reddit joined the fediverse I would happily consume their content. It would actually be a wonderful compromise where reddit wouldn’t have to provide direct app support and instead just publish out via ActivityPub and people could build third party clients through that.
I left Twitter because they killed Tweetbot and I left Reddit because they killed Apollo. I genuinely hate the experience of those sites with their native apps, and I use these kinds of services almost exclusively on my phone.
While I also hate Elon Musk and Spez, I strongly dislike most tech CEOs so while a motivator, it wasn’t the biggest factor for me. It’s important to remember we’re not all here for the same reason, and user-level instance blocking is the real solution here.
You don’t like some fediverse member? Then block them at the user level and move on, or start your own server and block them there. Don’t force everyone else on your server to not even have the option just for you.
I came to the Threadiverse because Reddit was closing its APIs and building the walls higher around its garden. I will be supremely disappointed if the Threadiverse collectively turns around and does the same thing.
So instances on the fediverse have some obligation to let entities who (A) will control 99% of the content, against our values of a decentralized, more evenly distributed fediverse; (B) have zero interest in an open fediverse; and (C) have all the incentive in the world to prevent its growth and get more people on their own platform to ensure profit? As usually hesitant as I am about preemptive defederation, if the fediverse is to preserve its values of openness and ensure its growth, it can't let in for-profit corporations that will control most of the activity and that go directly against those values of openness we care about so much. Just as tolerance doesn't mean letting in those who are intolerant, an unwalled fediverse can and should put its guards up against those who want to take everything for themselves.
it gives Meta no incentive to do things right
Meta already has zero incentive to do things right. In fact, they have negative incentive, as people being on Mastodon or Kbin instead of Threads actively harms them. You will never see Mark Zuckerberg suggest that people spread out to other instances so that no one gains too much control, but you will see him try to get as many people from the other instances on Threads as possible. We are talking about making our activity dependent on a for-profit tech corporation. If we were way larger so that Threads wouldn't control such a massive portion of activity, I wouldn't be as concerned, but as things stand now, we're letting our content pool be dominated by a company that has interests in direct opposition with ours. I can't see a scenario where any of this ends well.
Nothing makes it special. My point is not that I think Facebook will do no wrong, my point is that it's counterproductive to defederate from them before they've done something wrong.
Glad Flipboard is expanding in the Fediverse, I've been following their various news accounts on Mastodon for a while now. It especially helps the fediverse feel more complete as a social media platform.
Sure, these don't really matter for Lemmy and Kbin, but they are a huge deal for microblogging platforms like mastodon or misskey.
I mean, you know they aren't going to have adequate content moderation because they ALREADY don't. Lack of moderation is the #1, #2, and #3 best reasons to defederate.
Wanting to see proof before taking positive action is valid and sensible. But you can't pretend it isn't something you can already make reasonable inferences about. This is not a new unknown and pretending it is is ridiculous.
Email servers do not automatically feed content into and pull content out of your system. They only send and deliver to specific people at specific addresses. Federation is a firehose. You can close the hydrant before or after it gets hooked up to city water, but at the end of the day only people that chose to do things the sensible way will have dry socks and no water damage.
this is just not true, sorry. instances only retrieve/pushed specified actions/actors. . pretending it is is ridiculous. this is now a new unknown, this is how the ap protocol works.
and your shit is already public, if they want to suck it all in there is literally nothing stopping them right now. federation or not.
Like I linked in the OP post, the problem isn't their implementation of the protocol, but what FB is, and what it has done; and it probably would not stop doing it in the Fediverse. If Hannnibal Lecter moved in the neighbourhood I wouldn't answer his dinner invite, just to see what's on the menu.
whatever. i hate facebook, i dont use their crap. but im not going out of my way to block their AP protocol any more than i would their SMTP protocol.
when their activity in a specific context demonstrably, negatively affects my system, ill take action as i would any negative impact from any protocol on any of my services.
when i get a spammer, i block them. but again, im not going out of my way to spite some big asshole company, and potentially lose out on coordinating an offramp for those trapped in its walls.
everyone here as proven one thing: there is no technical reason to block threads. its entirely political/moral/spite and a lot of 'maybes'.
i hate facebook, i dont use their crap.
when their activity negatively affects my system, ill take action
You made it black and white. But don't mind me, dismiss what I say; just don't go crying the next time someone you know dies from covid cause they read on Threads that vaccines are bad.
This post doesn’t address the main “pro-federation” point that I have seen. People who are support of federation aren’t saying that Facebook is a great company, they have great morales or that they aren’t supporting ActivityPub for their own gain. I think there is very little doubt that FB is a shit organization with no morales who thinks that this is a great move to get people back to their sites.
The most common reason that I see people supportive of Threads’ federation is that they believe it will help people move off of Facebook and other proprietary platforms onto more user-friendly ones. If all of your friends use Instagram it is very hard to move to Mastodon. If you want to stay in touch you will at least need two accounts. You can move friends but it is hard because they each need to make that switch and it affects their interaction with others, or they need to manage multiple accounts until most of their friends have switched. If your friends use Threads (and it federates) then you can switch to Mastodon with very little friction, you can still interact with all of your existing friends in more or less the same way. Similarly each friend can easily move without managing multiple accounts during the transition. If all instances have blocked threads.net many people just won’t move, they will stay with FB.
To make a good argument you need to either refute this perceived advantage or argue that it isn’t worth the downsides. Making up a strawman doesn’t convince anyone.
I get what you're saying, I think most people fear that instead FB's septic tank will spill and spread in the Fediverse instead; I already had to deal with some "FREE SPEECH!" guy that wanted it to be a platform where people for example from Hamas and Israel could discuss and "agree to disagree".
It's not a bad thing, gives you the option to read them on the Fediverse and it proves that the Fediverse could possibly be the future of Social Media. It's good to see other people want to see it grow.
If people don't like it then personally block it, the only reason for blocking a whole instance, instance wide is if it has morals that conflict to much such as a Anti-LGBT instance vs a LGBT one.
Let's put it this way: Just because they live under an oppressive regime doesn't mean we should be mean to them and keep them isolated in their evil bubble.
Say, many would agree that Han people in China are oppressed. They have a ton of middle-class citizens who are free to leave the country, they just don't want to permanently due to not thinking it'd be better.
Same applies to Threads, though maybe a stronger case for leaving.
I’m not having a conversation that compares people signing up to their favourite social media channel with people who suffer systemic discrimination every day in their lives.
I don't think these things matter man, unless they create a community on the threadiverse, most of us on kbin use threads, microbloggig is the minority and full-on microblogging people simply use mastodon.
I'd disagree that they don't matter at all. Even if you don't, there are plenty of people who use the microblog side of Kbin and care about what's in the microblog feed. Obviously, this doesn't concern people who only use threads, but that's not a reason to assert that we shouldn't care.
Sorry I did not mean it does not "matter at all", but I certainly think this is going to be a minority. Although this will be great for Mastodon users, Kbin's userbase is already small, young, growing but small, and the portion of users using microblogging of that is low.
Ah, I follow. Even so, I'd love to see Kbin grow as a platform for viewing, interacting with, and posting microblogs. I have gotten a ton of value out of the All Content view, and I think that more robust microblogging will make Kbin a much more attractive platform. Thus, I think it's important to consider the impact (for better or for worse) of big contributors like Flipboard and Threads, even if most of the people on Kbin rn aren't bothering with microblogs.
Yeah it might be an added "Bonus" for people in the long-term besides threads, I think Kbin is certainly starting to cater to the audience that are mainly here for threads but it's also "nice" to have microblogging to keep in touch with both.
I'm not at my computer, so please excuse any mobile issues. I'm in favor of the move, because it will help to simultaneously connect and decentralize communications across the platforms. Say what you will about Facebook (you're probably right), but if they're that bad, then it seems logical to me to connect to their federated service even more aggressively.
The more we push our content (and by extension the Fediverse content that kbin aggregates), the less impact their algorithm can have. The more we go out of the way to expose their content, the harder we make it them to curate/censor/suppress any voices. And if, when comparing two Fediverse instances or softwares, we find that what's been pushed to them is different, we the users can call it out to news organizations (or make it public ourselves).
And yes, I know I'm making the arguments for supporting private companies in adopting open-source. It's about being able to audit what companies we don't trust are doing.
In addition to that, I'm currently a Threads user. Anecdotally, there's a lot of wholesome content on there that I appreciate, and what limited advertising is there is nowhere near as obtrusive as Reddit or the main Facebook platform.
I’ve seen an argument that defederation would just hurt the fediverse, and that even an exploitative giant like Meta should therefore be welcomed.
I think that’s like arguing that we should get rid of antitrust laws, which we have for good reason. We need to be able to stop bad actors and the damage they do. Especially large ones.
If a Mastodon instance was run by someone who allowed a genocide to be fuelled by their platform, and earn money from the advertising, I think we'd defederate in a heart beat. It just doesn't seem consistent to federate with them.
I see what you’re saying, but I really don’t see what Meta stands to gain in the long run from an open fediverse. It just doesn’t seem compatible with their business model to allow users who aren’t on their platform to interact with content created on their platform. They need data so they can sell it to advertisers, and I don’t see how that works when your users can just jump to another instance with no advertisments and access all the same content.
What do you think Meta stands to gain from Activity Pub, and why wouldn’t they just make their own closed protocol? (I am asking in good faith, because I do not really know.)
As I understand it, they’re joining precisely because they’d gain little. By flooding it with their content, any new user would think Fediverse=Threads.
I’ve seen the acronym EEE (Embrace, Expand, Extinguish) thrown a lot in these discussions because it’s a 3-word summary of their presumed strategy.
My question is, what has Threads done to influence Mastodon development so far in a bad way.
lets Say threads is just the mainstream platform of the fediverse. The protocol is all open source, and every one is in control of their servers. If it is federated whats the worse that could happen?
Plus you can always switch to lemmy, firefish, and etc. to try to avoid threads platform wide.
I wouldn't say kbin would be harmed necessarily even if maybe just a tiny bit. A good amount of the users on Lemmy (can't say much about kbin hadn't tried it yet) hate threads. So as an alternative to Mastodon, that would actually more likely score them points not detract from a user perspective.
Most likely, for a user to be on kbin or Lemmy you either come from Reddit, or you come from Mastodon so the users would had likely made up their mind on separating themselfs from major platforms, that likely includes threads.
Counterpoint, what has Meta done to gain even the tiniest bit of the semblance of the doubt. If someone's punched you in the face every time you've knocked on their door, are you really going to knock on it a 15th time? You'd be a fool to expect that time to be any different.
Just like you'd be a fool to expect the overall impact of Meta having their fingers in the Fediverse to be anything other than harmful.
I feel the post doesn't really address my concerns.
Really? You think Threads will take over and rule Mastodon? Threads is its own platform, users on the fediverse can still join Mastodon #servers of their choice and leave. I expect we'l see plenty of anti #threads Mastodon servers pop up. If Threads were to somehow get an influence in Mastodon, just switch to #lemmy switch to #pixelfed switch to #firefish So many choices.
This seems to not really understand the risk Threads poses. Threads is its own platform, yes, but it will dominate the visible content of any instance that federates with it. It's very dangerous to depend on a massive, profit-driven corporation for activity on the fediverse, as the things we value on the fediverse (decentralization, transparency, even distribution of content between instances, etc.) go against the corporation's motives. Meta does not stand to benefit from any of the things we value, and most of the Threads userbase (i.e. casual Instagram users) probably won't notice or care about federation. Meta does benefit if everyone depends on them for content, as then they can pull people to Threads just by defederating. People will choose to go to Threads where the amount of activity is what they're used to over staying on their Mastodon instance after activity has plummeted and they can't see most of the people they follow.
This is a big one. Meta might capture the mainstrean fediverse. Lets just be real the average regular internet user wasn't going to join Mastodon in the first place. Not that they wouldn't want to it just isn't on their list next to #facebook#instagram#tiktok#youtube#discord or even #twitter . Actually I take what Meta is doing as a compliment to the fediverse. Remember Twitter at one time under #elon#elonmusk banned the talk of Mastodon or something like that. Threads might not have our interests at heart but they are already mainstream so why should they not allow their users be federated with us?
Yes, there are definitely a lot of people that the fediverse is just never going to appeal to. But of those who are interested in the fediverse, more will be inclined to join Threads due to it having most of the content & just requiring an Instagram login. There is a pool of people out there who will try out the fediverse if they're introduced to it — that's how we all got here — and if people can interact with the big Mastodon, Kbin, etc. instances from Threads, many will choose to do that when they wouldn't have otherwise.
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568@rob299 Yes. But also Meta's screwed-up moderation systems will be brought to bear against fedi instances. The latter will essentially have to endure a shitty AI-generated smear campaign.
@FinchHaven@ThatOneKirbyMain2568 what I meant by that section you quoted from the post was, if Meta were to influence the development of Mastodon. If you switch to Firefish or others mentioned, you would probably have a more preferred dev team then what could happen to Mastodon with Meta.
I don't think "the development" is what is claimed to be at stake here.
OP is not talking about the software, they're talking about the content. And the content model from Mastodon is not interchangeable with the one from Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc. they serve different purposes and have different models.
It's like saying that if most people use gmail for email you will switch from email to phone calls to avoid communicating with google's service. As if real time audio were the same thing as sending a message.
One thing you could argue is, instead of switching services, switching to an instance that does defederate if you dont want threads content. But that same argument can be said as well towards those wanting threads federation...
But dont think the point is what does the individual want (if that were the case, just use the option to block threads content for your user, without defederating), the point is what's best for the fediverse. I think people are afraid that something similar to what happened with "google talk" and their embrace of xmpp will repeat.
Personally, I think there's no reason to jump the gun this early... all of this post is based on a lot of weak assumptions. I dont believe that threads content would overwhelm the feeds, and if that were to happen then the software could be tweaked to prevent it.
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