Adam Mosseri:
Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.
Anyone who doesn’t understand that connecting in any way to Facebook is not a good thing … is either very naive, or complicit to wanting to take down the fediverse.
Facebook already has enough content and enough of a platform on their own – they literally control half of the worldwide social media network. Why do they want to spread into this new space?
The only reason they want to be on this side is to conquer or destroy.
This perspective of “Either you agree with me or you’re complicit in a conspiracy against me” is incredibly childish and immature.
Sometimes people have different opinions than you. Try to find a way to deal with it.
To me it’s like warning someone to not stand in the middle of the highway, and having some guy go “don’t tell me what to do, I have the right to disagree with you”.
There are idiots in the world and their opinions are actually idiotic. :)
It’s 100% super obvious that Meta wants to control the fediverse, and that’s why they are coming for it.
Can you explain how it’s 100% super obvious? I thought a popular platform with many users entering the fediverse might be good for exposure but it seems like the consensus here is that it’s actually bad. Help me understand how it’s bad?
In summary we know everything Facebook does is pretty evil, it’s “super obvious” that this will therefore be pretty evil too, right?
Ok yeah make sense! I’m definitely not a fan of Facebook’s and Meta’s data policies either.
But how is anyone going to control a decentralised platform tho? What you’re describing seems like it would only apply to users on instances controlled by Meta, i.e. on threads itself. Or maybe I still don’t understand how the fediverse works.
One way I can think of is by being such a big player that they dominate and can thereby exert their will. For example, lemmy.world is the largest lemmy instance and we’ve seen a few communities on other instances dry up in favour of the ones on the big server. Now imagine that server is a hundred times bigger than the next largest and the people in charge have an active financial interest in moving people to their platform - if they play it carefully (and I’m sure they’ll be employing people to think about how to do this) they can shift the existing content into a place they can control it.
Alright I see, thanks a lot for explaining
Since almost everything on the Fediverse is open for all to see, anyone can already be mining the data just by setting up their own instance of Lemmy or Mastodon. This might make it difficult to sell fediverse-generated data for profit.
I’m sure they have a plan (otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it!), maybe it relies on using their app which also has your real name and phone number, maybe it’s for some legal loophole which means all fediverse users technically agree to their terms just by federating. I don’t know what they’re up to, but given their previous behaviour I think it’s safer not to even let them try!
tell your friends
Normally and with very many other issues … I would agree with you … but on this issue I very adamant about what I see and believe.
Think about it … Facebook is a billion dollar corporation and they show interest in your little world and the little things you are doing and they want to join you. This is a company that already has billions invested in systems that already have billions of users and millions of dollars of man power and technological resources. Why do they want to step into what we are doing here? Why do they feel a need to step into our space? Do they need more users? Do they need help from us?
Big corporations are only interested in perpetual growth at all costs. They are also deathly afraid of competition or the potential of future competition. Look at the history of manufacturing, automotive corporations over the past hundred years … it’s a long history of the strong eating the weak.
I agree my argument may sound childish or extreme but in this instance it’s pretty clear … if you let them in, it’s basically the beginning of the end for the fediverse.
It’s the metaphorical Trojan Horse … once it’s inside and firmly established, everything will be lost.
They’re saying that those opinions are naïve.
I see you conveniently left out the bit where they said people could also just be naive. Kind of funny how you attempted to take the moral high ground and lecture this person like they were a small child, yet you yourself cherrypicked in bad faith just to have some little takedown moment. One of you certainly came off more childish and immature in this exchange and it wasn’t the other guy.
Tell that to @Gargron@mastodon.social (the creator of Mastdon, AFAIK). He’s very excited about this. And I can’t honestly understand why.
https://mstdn.social/@Gargron@mastodon.social/111576826633308486
Well he’s not alone … a number of relatively vocal “fedi-advocates” are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.
Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where “we” are up to.
From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves “the good guys” and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating “significant” technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They’re all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.
When face-to-face with the prospect of having “your thing” accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. “Growing the protocol” and “growing” mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.
This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they’re “the good guys” and don’t work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their “ethical-tech” world … the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.
Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer “growth” might completely miss the point especially if it’s by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.
And this is where I’m up to on this issue … both sides seem not to be talking about it much.
What is the “emotional”, “social fabric”, “vibes and feelings” factor in all this … that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens … when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL’s loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I’m betting most will feel off … like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit … passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves … “what was the point of coming here in the first place?”.
Now, to be real, it’s not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it’s an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won’t be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? … that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it’d rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)
Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they’re willing to drink for their ends.
For my purposes … I don’t think I’ll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens … the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it … I’d rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.
Yea I was really confused to read that. I’m on Kbin / Lemmy significantly more than I log in to Mastadon (I think I’ve opened that app 5 times in the past year), so now I guess I’ll just delete Mastadon.
I bet he’s getting a big bag of money.
Are you truly incapable of imagining that someone might have a different opinion than you without being bribed?
“Everyone who disagrees with me must be getting paid” is not the mature take you think it is.
Are you truly incapable of acknowledging that large bags of money motivate people to do unpopular things sometimes?
I really don’t care about Mastadon as I haven’t used it much, but I couldn’t really think of a good reason for federating with Meta.
So you have evidence of bribes?
That’s cool. Please share with the class.
LMAO… “bribes”… no, I have no evidence of “bribes.” I don’t have any evidence of a financial incentive either, as very clearly evident by my phrasing starting with “I bet…” I’m simply relying on 40 years of not having my head completely up my own ass to make some inferences about things, and if I’m wrong, then I’m wrong. I think you’re being intentionally obtuse. None of this really is impactful, but you sure seem to have an agenda.
You have evidence that I’m wrong, correct?
Well a good reason could be that it brings federation to the masses. You know, like everyone who uses federated networks wants it to be. This isn’t some exclusive club and wider adoption is a good thing.
If only to prove that it can work.
I wouldn’t call that a good reason to team up with Meta, but I would call it a plausible. Everyone does not want to federate with the largest social media company in the world, I can promise you that. If you like federation, you’d probably like it to not be engulfed by megacorps (unless you stand to profit from it).
Yeah, there’s a good chance he’s either a naïve moron that thinks Meta has good intentions, or a techbro that soyfaces at any proprietary technology that has incorporated a trendy technology.
The fediverse means all of them. Mastodon users post to Lemmy and Kbin. We’ll see threads here.
Just migrate your account to a different instance, if you plan to use it. It’s not difficult and many of them already defederate from Threads (mstdn.social, for instance).
I think I’ve logged in for a collective 15 minutes. I deleted it about 45 minutes ago.
Let’s apply Occam’s Razor. We all created these juggernaut social media vampires in the 2000s as an alternative to isolated forums and the first federation attempts with Webrings. When it started, Facebook was a good thing.
He could simply be repeating the same mistake the entire internet did by embracing monolithic social media sites in the first place.