I think defederating Threads is a huge missed opportunity for Mastodon to grow.
Imagine interacting with their users and letting them know that: you scroll posts without ads, your timeline is in chronological order, your client doesnāt spy on you, you only see what you want and no other content is pushed to your timeline, etcā¦
if I was a Threads users, I would move to Mastodon as soon as I find out š
Here's my prediction, but I'd like others to contribute their predictions as well. I think it's important that we make ourselves aware of signs before they start showing, and that we have a record to point to if things play out exactly as we predict....
Or perhaps the Fediverse will notice, and evolve solutions? Massive parallel explorations of a problem space is what open standards distributed FOSS development does best!
If FB hadn't done this, someone else would, and probably will. Obstacles point the way forward.
@thundergod97 āwe totally canāt know for sure Meta will be a negative influenceā are you serious ? Iāve you not heard / read anything about their products for the last 15 years ?
Theyāre not good guys, they never were. Open your eyes.
@Seth You can stop with putting words in my mouth.
Fosstodon fosters free and open software development. That means transparency. That means leaving things open as much as possible.
I fully expect them to be the evil corporation they have been in the last 15 years. I fully expect we will get to a point where they will have to defederate from them.
That's not the default position though. You leave it open until there's no other choice but to close it off.
@thundergod97 wow iām really sorry i dared ātranslateā your āIf they turn out to be a negative influenceā in a sarcastic āwe totally canāt know for sure Meta will be a negative influenceā
to me both those sentences have the same meaning but i might have misunderstood your initial statement.
tbh i donāt understand the point of āleave it open until thereās no other choiceā when you āfully expect them to be the evil corporation they have been the last 15 yearsā
iām not advocating for a Minority Report situation where we lock people before they even had the idea of doing something wrong. Iām just saying that itās a safer move to place a lock on your door or your parked bike, and eventually donāt use it / remove it if your neighboorhood is trustworthy enough than wait to see if your house has been burgled or your bike stolen before considering locking it.
Especially when we know how said bad faith actor has been acting for 15 years and keep acting today.
@donhawkins
That's the thing. When they first announced how many people had signed up, it was 10 million. That was more than makes up the entire Fediverse right now. The second number was 30 million, tripling that.
So why are they even considering federating?
Why are they even considering exposing their userbase to people who haven't bought into their BS hook line and sinker?
@donhawkins
Do they think they will get many converts over when most of us intentionally left traditional social media because of their bullshit?
No of course they don't.
They are trying to take over where Twitter has faultered. Hooking into the wave of people jumping ship is a way forward...something no other traditional media has done. Their motivations are unclear right now...so it's wise to be cautious. That's still why I like the wait and see attitude Fosstodon has.
@thundergod97 @donhawkins I think it's a play at avoiding antitrust and other forms of regulatory action.
By federating they can say "See we support an Open Internet and competition" even if only at a surface level. The vast majority will never switch once they join threads and those of us that wouldn't join are still exposed to their data collection by proxy unless we want to be siloed into irrelevance. Think about how Gmail dominates email despite email being federated.
@donhawkins @thundergod97 The point I was making was that Gmail makes up the vast majority of email accounts globally, and cutting off all Gmail users from communicating with you would make life impossibly difficult.
Similarly, Federating Threads will result in the majority of users, content, and discussions occurring on the Threads instance, making it so any instance defederates from it will find themselves without a sufficient amount of content/discussion to keep people on the platform.
@donhawkins @thundergod97 I suppose that's possible, but that would require billions of people to ditch Google and I just don't see that happening. 1/8th of the global population uses Gmail. Those things only had a tiny fraction of a percentage of the number of users.
I should probably hedge what I'm saying here with "I don't see that happening unless Elon Musk acquires Google or something else catastrophic occurs like Google being banned from the EU entirely."
Do u recall when Wells Fargo Bank was in the news for signing up their existing clients for new accts that they never asked for, and got their wrists slapped for a few Million$? Yeah well, the Threads sign-up count turns out to be sorta like that. Ya know, kindda like a crowd estimate for a tRump rally too. The laws of nature say that for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. My own will be to delete my Instagram altogether. Just like I did w/FB long ago.
āwait and see how it shakes out, then decideā
look how Cambridge Analytica shook out lmao. Meta has committed extreme, large scale crimes on every platform. How can you expect anything different here?
I have a welcoming house. But I donāt invite known criminals and abusers into it until thereās a problem.
@andreagrandi Also threads is the closest thing that some.entities will ever get to having a presence. Like big musicians you may want to follow, down to local city news orgs.
Thats the kind of thing I kind of miss.
@andreagrandi That's fine and dandy until Meta does the inevitable and creates a walled garden of trusted communities and defederates from all else, no?
Meta has zero financial nor cultural motive to embrace the Fediverse as we understand it other than extinguish it. This is why they are linking your Threads account to Instagram and requiring that you delete Instagram in order to delete your Threads account. And they still are trying to sell us on the idea that their accounts are "portable?"
Probably a good enough excuse as any to delete IG. Our images are about to be scraped up to feed AI anyway.
> That's fine and dandy until Meta does the inevitable and creates a walled garden of trusted communities and defederates from all else, no?
They are actually going to do it the other way, only federating with trusted instances that signed an NDA first.
And no, you are not going to convince anybody @andreagrandi, they just don't care and are programed. Other wise they'd looked out for options like the fediVerse already.
Not to mentio that META would track and prevent this.
@glockenspiel @andreagrandi I think it's very likely that the reason why Meta is embracing ActivityPub is to be able to comply with the EU Digital Markets Act and the direction it's heading.
They do not care even the slightest about Mastodon or its userbase. We are essentially irrelevant. They care about getting an early strong position in the technology that will likely forcibly become industry standard in SoMe.
@glockenspiel @andreagrandi you just confirmed that defederating an instance with a large user group (most of which are fine), just because you don't like the admin, leads to creating a walled garden.
You explained it even better than OP did. š
@andreagrandi and that you can follow every other Fedi service from *one* account.
I think the next most visible thing will be seeing their friends (us) switching servers without penalty.
And topic focused servers too
@andreagrandi so many problems with this. Threads culture will swamp fedi culture and *that* is all we need to consider.
Ten million people (so far) cannot federate without an impact on fedi culture, which is the most important reason for being on Mastodon.
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