My takeaways:
Mosseri says that the Threads team wants to make it so the option to follow a Threads account on other platforms is available to “all public accounts on Threads, not just a handful of testers.”
You can only follow other threads accounts?
At the moment, he says the team plans to require accounts to be public and that users “explicitly opt in” to showing their posts on other federated servers. But the team is still considering making this the default, with the choice to opt out, instead.
They’re planning on using the fediverse content and server space without providing any.
The Threads team wants to let replies from other platforms show up inside of Threads. “It’s a bad experience now that I have to leave the Threads app to see replies I’m getting from the broader community,”
It’s the content they want the most, this makes it clear if you have to leave their app to reply to someone on another instance. We’re the zoo.
This is a key one: follower portability. “Eventually, it should also be possible to enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app / server,” Mosseri writes. “I believe that it’s important that creators own their relationship with their audience.”
The bolded words makes me think that they’re not going to do any of that, lol
Please instance owners, don’t wait and see.
This is a key one: follower portability. “Eventually, it should also be possible to enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app / server,” Mosseri writes. “I believe that it’s important that creators own their relationship with their audience.”
How do they benefit from it though? 🤔
They benefit by being able to say to regulators, especially in the EU, that they aren’t a monopoly that locks people into their ecosystem. They avoid expensive legal battles, fines, and possibly being forced to open their other, more lucrative silos. These are lesser benefits, but they also get cred for doing something cool, get to position themselves as a better alternative to Twitter, and might get to say that they beat Bluesky to full federation.
That’s reasonable although I believe it’s just not how they do things. This feature lets their users to move to ad-free mastodon instances including those that signed fedi-pact. And it will be available in a few clicks in their app (I suppose it will).
they beat Bluesky to full federation.
I also think they’re more interested in Bluesky.
Their last EU fine was $1.3 billion. That’s change-how-you-do-things money. The EU is getting more serious about tech regulation. It also made Apple add RCS support, which they swore they’d never do.
This feature lets their users to move to ad-free mastodon instances including those that signed fedi-pact.
I don’t think that’s possible. You have to be federated. Suspended servers can’t connect at all so there’s no way to transfer followers or set a redirect. It’s not something you can just choose to not respect - suspension is something done to untrustworthy servers so requiring them to honor it would completely break it immediately. If they signed the fedi pact and didn’t act, that’s not really on Meta.
I don’t think that’s possible. You have to be federated.
Still possible with intermediary but yeah, that’s much less convenient. Well, I hope that’s true. Unfortunately, even if they really have done this because of EU they still may try to monetize non-Threads users.
If they use a Mastodon intermediary, there’s a 30-day cool down. If they use their own, they’d have to expose the IP to do it so it would be discovered. I don’t see how it would benefit them to do that. If they did, that’s some sketchy, bad faith shit and they’d be universally fediblocked pretty quick.
I also don’t think they can monetize non-threads users because they can’t send them ads. It would be difficult to connect you to a Meta account to serve ads to because they only have your user name, profile pic, server IP, and server domain name. In most cases it’d be impossible. You’re pretty well protected because Mastodon servers treat all remote servers as untrustworthy and don’t give them any info.
It would be difficult to connect you to a Meta account to serve ads to because they only have your user name, profile pic, server IP, and server domain name. In most cases it’d be impossible. You’re pretty well protected because Mastodon servers treat all remote servers as untrustworthy and don’t give them any info.
Facebook already creates “shadow profiles” for people not on Facebook and stores data about them. This means Meta won’t directly monetize the fediverse, but use the data available for their ad business anyway. (Maybe even connect other accounts through posts, but I don’t know how well this works with the info and amount of a users posts.)
Nothing stopping them from doing it now, anyone posting to the fediverse has to accept that their posts can and probably will be used to train someone elses LLM. It’s public afterall.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-profiles-and-should-you-be-worried/
Great, so he is already talking about how to extend activityPub? He says that like this function will be a one way street. This is literally what many here are talking about.
He’s literally talking about the ability to migrate accounts, or the very least export your data. Which is a feature on many platforms of Fediverse. There’s no “extend” whatsoever
