ayyndrewThreads readies handy explainer of Mastodon and the fediverse
estyWhen you limit replies, your thread will not be shared with your fediverse followers. Private profiles will be able to follow an interact with people on other platforms at a later date.
Extend.
masterspaceDo you know what happens to protocols over time? They get extended with user facing features or they stop being used and die.
Once again, Meta got 100M users in a week, they do not need to support the fediverse. Stop acting like this is some calculation and not just them building the same basic features they have in their other platforms that users expect into their new one.
macniel100M users in a week by turning every instagram account into a threads account; until its activated it remains a shadow account but still counts in their book.
vaguerantThere are literally, not exaggerating, over one billion Instagram accounts in existence. It's self-evidently not the case that they have just silently registered everybody a Threads account and are counting those numbers.
You know whats the big issue here is? That those who were nagged into trying Threads, can’t back out as it would kill their Instagram accounts as well. So all those conflated numbers will be dead in the water.
You know what's irrelevant to the current conversation about how they have so many users they don't need us?
How many fediverse accounts are there total? A couple hundred thousand? And how many of those are duplicates across instances?
Whether or not all those users stick is irrelevant, the user counts for lemmy / kbin also won't have all of them stick. The point is that they do not need us or our content. They can hit a bill without even supporting activitypub.
Then why would they even move to ActivtyPub in the first place, huh?
the EU, probably?
My guess would be that
a) building their next social network on an open platform will let antitrust regulators off their back
and b) a Twitter clone sounds less sexy then a web3 / decentralized fediverse play. Meta has chased every other bandwagon (metaverse, ai, etc), it's entirely possible this is just them always chasing the hot new thing so that they don't miss out. They certainly aren't going to let themselves be Blackberry and refuse to change, they'd rather desperately copy every hot new thing and change quickly to always stay on top.
A new EU law has restrictions on gatekeepers, and using ActivityPub means they’re less likely to be deemed gatekeepers.
There are over 2B Instagram accounts actually and over 115M in the US alone, so yeah, they definitely didn't just starting counting them all.
And it would only be a protocol extension when it would be returned upstream, which I highly doubt that Facebook’s parent company Meta would do that.
Oh yeah, Meta definitely never contributes anything back to the open source community, I type into a React frontend, that uses a GraphQl communication protocol to an API built using node, watchman, and a variety of other meta made or sponsored projects.
/S
there is a difference between having your own open source projects like graphql and react and contributing to open source projects like ActivityPub.
naveIf all instagram users counted they would have 2 billion users. I dislike Meta as much as the next guy but let’s not pretend threads isn’t ridiculously popular.
No, it doesn’t. The 100M is real. Musk really fucked up, Zuck took advantage of the opportunity.