Hi everyone, I am collecting preemptive pikachu faces for when meta inevitably attempts to screw the fediverse over. Please put them in replies to this comment so we don’t clutter up the rest of the comments.
- 1999, XMPP is born. 👶
- 2005, Google launches “Talk”, touted as a “great victory for XMPP”, with “large-scale XMPP services”.
- 2012, Google encourages “Talk” users to switch to “Hangouts”.
- 2013, Google drops open XMPP interoperability with other servers.
- 2015, Google begins shutting down “Talk” clients.
- 2017, previous phase is now complete, XMPP is virtually unheard of.
- 2022, Google shuts down all XMPP integration. XMPP is, for all intents an purposes, dead. 🪦
- 2016, Mastodon is born. 👶
- 2023, Meta launches “Thread”, touted as a great victory for Mastodon. ← You are here.
- 2030, Meta encourages “Thread” users to switch to “Fabric”.
- 2031, Meta drops open ActivityPub interoperability with other servers.
- 2033, Meta begins shutting down “Thread” clients.
- 2035, previous phase is now complete, Mastoson is virtually unheard of.
- 2040, Meta shuts down all Mastodon integration. Mastodon is, for all intents an purposes, dead. 🪦
N.B.: The delays in the timeline were copied over verbatim. Historical conditions have to be taken into account, as the popular adoption of internet began in the late 2000s. So it is likely for the “extinguish” phase of Mastodon to happen much faster. I give it 5 years tops. And by 2030, we will all remember it as we now remember XMPP.
2017, previous phase is now complete, XMPP is virtually unheard of.
So it returned back to a state where it would have been without Google anyway.
All the Jabber clients and services combined were never even close to rivaling ICQ, AIM, MSN, Skype, or whatever else ruled the IM space back then.
So it returned back to a state where it would have been without Google anyway.
The state before Google was “up and coming solution for federated chat”
The state after Google was “impractical solution that does not federate¹ properly, and is hard to set up²”.
Those are not the same.
1: because of Google.
2: because of Google.Users don’t care about federation. For them, there is no such category as “federated chat”. There is only “chat”.
XMPP never had significant market share among the instant messengers of the time (except maybe as custom solutions for work chat, but not as a consumer service).
Yeah, of course it would have not ever been a mainstream thing for end users. But Google definitely nipped them in the bud, both by providing a (bogus) drive behind the XMPP development (and so, preventing anyone else from doing so), and also by kickstarting them into relative widespread use instead of letting them grow organically.
If they had, there is a possibility XMPP would have become a service provided by nerds for their friends and family as soon as 2010, like email, or more recently, nextcloud.
And it would have been a valid option for corporate solutions. But no, instead, we got slack. Thanks, Google.
Same old corporate strategy. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
I honestly forgot Threads even existed.
Embrace extend extinguish
Don’t federate with corps, it will only end badly
Hold your ground men, stay on non-corpo socials (here)!
They can’t really do anything they couldn’t already do if we do that.
Please could you tell me what success looks like for ActivityPub if it doesn’t involve adoption?
It’ll look like what we already have. Swaths of users self hosting, with lots of redundancy to deal woth instances that have problems.
And that might mean it needs to stay small, but that’s OK. Not all success is measured in popularity.
Staying free, open, and undriven by this idea of a shareholder that will destroy anything good in the pursuit of profit.
corpo philosophy 101
Didn’t most of the fediverse preemptively de-federate them already?
Mastodon.social, the biggest instance ran by Mastodon devs didn’t and encourages wait and see approach.
I’m on that server and that’s how I feel too.
If it goes poorly, then it can be blocked, but to not try seems silly to me.
And the frog could just jump out of the pot before he boils.
Sure, every other time the water has kept getting hotter and hotter like this it ended up boiling but honestly I really trust the corporations here and I think we should just wait it out! They promised they were just going to slowly heat the water up but not bring it to a boil so I don’t see a reason not to trust them.
Which they do, if you are trying to boil them.
Not in the obvious metaphor I was making.
I’m pointing out the metaphor is false and your argument might as well
The metaphor is clear, and your correction has no bearing on my point whatsoever.
Go be an annoying pedant somewhere else.
the biggest instance ran by Mastodon devs
Did it?
Is there a list of instance somewhere that we can pick from? I thought someone was putting together a list.
https://fedipact.veganism.social/ lists instances with their decision.
To see Instances that block threads.net click here
A lot of instances did, the flagship instances run by the Devs of Mastodon didn’t. They think that it’s good and want to encourage it, though at the same time their instances have a spam problem so bad many instances have decided to limit them, making it harder to follow people if your account is on them.
Also noticed that many people say they won’t follow people who are on Mastodon.social or approve follow requests. Which is a bit extreme but I also get it, there’s lots of spambots and not great people on those instances and moderation is slow since they’re so big which doesn’t really help.
some do.
I have a small community masto instance and don’t. If my users want to block the instance, it’s literally 2 clicks and a confirmation away.
Doing to server wide is massively patronizing towards the users
Nah, users can vote and then if they don’t get the vote they want, they can go to another instance.
Users on Mastodon can simply block their domain if they want to.
But can’t Mastodon post on Lemmy and Lemmy can’t block instances on an individual basis? That’s the way I understand it currently stands. I don’t want threads showing up in my feed and would like to block them.
yup. And that’s what we did. The majority of people either didn’t care either way or didn’t want to block it. With way more “don’t block” than “block”. So that’s that. At least for now
How many users are on your instance? I’ve never heard of it.
a little over 20 active users
I see it as just virtue signaling. At the end, we can choose to not join those servers who defederate with them, but I can also think it’s a stupid decision at the same time lol.
You might want to look up what patronize means, in the common phrase “don’t patronize me” it’s used sarcastically.
Essentially, replace the word with “helpful” in your sentence, and you’ll see why it doesn’t fit.
They used it in a perfectly acceptable and understandable way. The definition you’re describing as sarcastic is an official meaning of the word. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/patronize
yeah, I get what you mean. But it’s still mostly fitting in the way I feel about it. Basically: users can think for themselves. They don’t need me to take care of the bit scary world out there.
Doing so for a whole instance feels super condecending. “I know better than you what you want. I’m going to block it”
I get what you meant, which is why I replied, I’m saying that that word means the opposite of what you intended.
To patronize someone is not a bad thing, the word means “to be someone’s customer/patron” and through doing so, supporting and helping them. That’s where patreons name comes from, for example.
In the phrase “don’t patronize me” it’s used sarcastically to say “I know you’re trying to help, but please don’t” but the word doesn’t actually refer to someone who is going over your head to do things for you. It’s actual meaning is 100% positive, and hence confuses what you’re saying. Which is that blocking threads should be done by users because it should be their decision.
Instead, your final sentences literal meaning, paraphrased, is “a server-wide block would be really good and helpful for all my users”.
I don’t know if it’s perhaps a regional thing but, in the UK, “being patronising” is used pretty much exclusively in the pejorative sense, with a similar meaning to “condescending”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard (in actual conversation) “being patronising” used to mean someone is giving patronage, in fact - we would say someone is “giving patronage” or “is a patron” instead. We also pronounce “patronise” differently, for whatever reason: “patron” is “pay-trun”, “patronage” is “pay-trun-idge” but “patronise” is “pah-trun-ise”.
It seems the pejorative use of the word dates back to at least 1755, too, so it’s not exactly a new development.
What about patronising as in ‘patronising this business’? A little archaic, but I do hear it from time to time, usually with the ‘pay’ pronounciation.
Then again, if someone is accusing me of being patronising (which happens a lot for reasons I don’t quite understand, but I digress), it’s split odds whether I’m “pah-trun-ising” or “pay-trun-ising”.
English is weird (perhaps this is its wyrd?)
It might be, but I’ve only ever seen it used in the condecending way. And it seems to be used like this for quite some time
Can’t argue with real-world use, but man that is a semantic shift that is doing the original word dirty.
Apparently patronage and other forms of the word are having their definitions affected, too.
I read a lot of books so I’m definitely a lot more used to how words are used up to several decades ago.
Welcome to humanity since the invention of language
yup. language is weird
I wouldn’t be too worried about Threads joining the fediverse.
They had the perfect opportunity to dethrone X with a superior app but have given users the most barebones piece of shit that doesn’t even have support for hashtags or trending topics.
Mastodon has this functionality.
Last time I booted up Threads, my feed was flooded with e-girls posting twerking videos. I don’t follow any such accounts on Threads nor Instagram and I don’t like it when my social media feels like a softcore porn platform.
it’s also doing a lot better than Mastodon because they integrated it with Instagram
I wish they wouldn’t. Stay a walled garden.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think this is actually a great thing for Mastodon. The truth is the majority of people are just never going to sign up for a Mastodon server as they stand today. The majority of people want algorithmic feeds run by a central entity. I know the people here don’t want that, but that’s what the majority of people do want. Will I use Threads? No but if this breathes more life into Mastodon and exposes more people to the concept then that is a good thing. Being able to use a client of your choice to interact with people on something like Threads is also a very good thing. The alternative is a completely closed social network like Twitter.
I know, I know “embrace, extend, extinguish”, but literally this is the best that we can hope for unfortunately. The alternative is everyone goes and uses a closed system.
Google the history of xmpp. This is exactly the same.
It’s not a good thing.
So we can let Mastodon die on the vine or chance it dying? Ok, I know my choice.
It’s not like the majority of people are already on open protocols. I’m sure Threads dwarfs Masrodon usage just as Twitter and possibly even BlueSky.
IF Mastodon was dominate I might have a different view but it’s not. If Threads federates then there is an opportunity to push people to other clients which make switching to a Mastodon/ActivityPub server much easier. That’s literally only upside. It’s not like the people on Mastodon now are going to leave it for Threads.
They might end up being forced to, should Threads decide to revert.
Mastodon users will inevitably hook up on Threads communities instead of fostering their own, and at that point being left to their own devices would be a catastrophe.
And yes, this is exactly what happened to xmpp.
What is the obsession with numbers? Centralization mentality is the problem. The idea that unless 5 Billion people are on a network will it be “successful” denies the joys of effective and sustainable networks. I really honestly wouldn’t want to see a fediverse server with more than 100K daily active users. I would rather have 10 instances of 10K active users.
Meta and those billionaire centrists can go fuck themselves.
I wouldn’t call it an obsession, but there does need to be a critical mass of users before a social networks become useful.
I simply don’t trust meta, they have incredibly bad precedent.
I’m not sure. Might be a great thing, but Facebook might equally be the equivalent of a whale landing in a small pond, killing everything else in the process.
I don’t see the issue. For all those concerned about privacy: you know you are posting in public space? Anyone can scrape the posts however they want. Which is a key aspect of openness btw.
On the other hand, by leaving Threads in would show other companies the concept of a global community instead of multple closed groups. The companies could save on moderation costs Reddit-Style that way, but open.
You need to learn your Internet history. It wasn’t so long ago that we had a diverse, interoperable community of instant messaging platforms based on XMPP, an open, federated protocol. Anybody could host their own XMPP server, and communicate with any other XMPP server. Then in 2006, Google added XMPP support to their Talk app and integrated it into the Gmail web interface. But there were problems:
First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing. They were not implementing everything. This forced XMPP development to be slowed down, to adapt. Nice new features were not implemented or not used in XMPP clients because they were not compatible with Google Talk (avatars took an awful long time to come to XMPP). Federation was sometimes broken: for hours or days, there would not be communications possible between Google and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers, posting irregularities and downtime (I did it several times, which is probably what prompted the job offer).
And because there were far more Google talk users than “true XMPP” users, there was little room for “not caring about Google talk users”. Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.
Only a few years later, Google would discontinue Google Talk, migrated all their users to Hangouts, and decimated the XMPP community in an instant. Most of the Google users never noticed, outside of some invalid contacts in their list.
That’s why everyone distrusts Meta. Even with Threads being a relatively unsuccessful platform by commercial social media standards, its active userbase still dwarfs the entire Fediverse combined. There’s absolutely nothing stopping Meta from running the exact same playbook:
-
Add ActivityPub support, but only partially
-
Add new features to ActivityPub without consulting with the rest of the Fediverse or documenting the extensions, degrading the experience for everyone not using Threads
-
Entice Fediverse users to migrate to Threads–after all, why use Mastodon or Lemmy when 95%+ of ActivityPub traffic originates from Threads?
-
Deprecate ActivityPub support after most of the Fediverse is on Threads, leaving it smaller and more fragmented than if Threads had never federated at all, while forcing everyone who migrated from another Fediverse platform to Threads into an impossible choice between abandoning the vast majority of their contacts or subjecting themselves to Meta’s policies, tracking, and moderation
-
Meta cant be trusted. Ever.
threads is centralized
If it federates with ActivityPub, it won’t be.
is have all users on one instance
The Threads software will still be centralized, but the network won’t be. It’s a bit like saying outlook.com email is centralized.
141 million users
It’s big, and that’s absolutely a threat from an embrace/extend/extinguish perspective. A big node on a decentralized network is still part of a decentralized network unless they start breaking the decentralization.
big node is still centralized
I was here when EEE started!
Pretty cool. I keep saying that this is a win for open standards and Meta probably does this to appease EU regulators. It’s no surprise that this happens as Threads launches In Europe.
Yep, can’t wait to be able to personally defederate from them, I hope that option comes soon.
I see it as an opportunity to tell people on Threads to leave Threads and use an open platform, such as Mastodon, instead. Then eventually Threads will shut down, because everyone moved :D
Won’t they have control over their instance though? I’m sure they’re going to run it like Reddit and shadow ban the shit out of their users and also not let them see certain stuff.
Far more likely to lean on their infrastructure advantage and add things like image and video hosting on-platform that the Fediverse can’t do now.
Then once secured, they can defederate from the actual fediverse and take the whole thing private.
or all of the above.
people don’t join because complicated
Why would you want to defederate at all? It’s akin to hiding your head in the sand, except done on a community-wide scale. Just because you can’t see the nazi over there in the bushes doesn’t mean he isn’t squatting there, observing you.
is facebook
why wouldn’t you want to defederate
bc there’s people on the other side :)
They certainly have the choice to migrate. If they don’t want to it’s their problem. Fediverse wasn’t meant to be a wide open connect with anyone anywhere unconditionally network, if you want that go to Nostr (it’s filled with Right wing trolls and crypto/nft bros for that very reason). It’s meant to allow for instances to communicate and share content while still being run independently of one another. That also includes the ability to block other servers.
Facebook and the like certainly aren’t filled with right wing trolls and the fediverse is a very niche thing. They have the choice, but they might not even know it.
Read this for an idea as to why people are against letting Meta federate: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
It’s not a cut and dry yes or no for me.
I might be looking at this wrong, so please let me know why if I am, but I don’t understand the argument that Google killed XMPP. The protocol existed before Google and still existed after Google. I assume the number of people using the XMPP protocol before Google implemented it was small. Then for a little while, Google added all of their users into the network who could now message all the “pure” XMPP users who were already there. After that though, when Google left the protocol and took all its users that weren’t using XMPP before then anyway, how did that kill it? Would you not still have the same group of XMPP users who were there before Google? Anyone you could chat with before you could still chat with now.
XMPP was very popular. Google joined it, and with it, the power to give it’s users on Gmail access to all the other chat products that all had more chat users by sharing the same XMPP space. Users were very happy to use the superior Gmail product and also let go of their old chat tools because they could still talk to everyone just fine!
Google waited until they had most of the users and simply started making non compatible changes to their chat until they finally defederated themselves and suddenly their users could no longer chat with anyone who wasn’t also on Google.
People noticed, but most of the users were no longer willing to drop their now-familiar gchat client because they were now used to it. Users like me who wanted to use Pidgin still were suddenly unable to chat with 80% of their friends unless they gave in and opened up gchat too.
If Google never federated with the system, we might still likely have aim, msn, etc still around focusing on their chat users. But Google did their thing, stole the market and we’re where we’re at now. Ironically, most people I know now disable Google chat because Google has tried really hard to ruin something that was just fine. But no one is installing Pidgin again and have mostly moved to Discord and Slack (at least in my circles).
Obviously we will have to see what sort of content comes in from Threads, but knowing Meta, they will be serving a lot of ads in it. So instances will effectively be distributing Meta ads for free. Well free for Meta; the instances will incur additional costs.
He already is, this is all open? They will include people’s numbers in their “awesome wave of the future” and I don’t want that. The more people ignore them and isolate them, the more they won’t have power over everyone.
What are “people’s numbers”? What power would they have if we didn’t defederate?
Dude, facebook is evil, we all know that. I have no idea how they plan to take over the fediverse, but they’re planning it. Do you remember when they first announced and then everyone suddenly started calling it the threadiverse? They have plans, hold on to your seat.
I’ve been under the impression people started using the term threadiverse to describe the Lemmy/Kbin side of the fediverse because we exist in Reddit style threads and interaction with microblog style fediverse posts is obtuse at best. We’re practically in a separate bubble over here, and that was the cause of the new term.
Edit: The first time I saw the term used was when FediDB made a page for tracking Lemmy+Kbin users
Edit 2: Archive.org link to the Threadiverse page from June 15th, half a month before the Threads name leaked.
I hadn’t heard it once until threads started up. I didn’t join until the great migration, so maybe earlier people used it, but I had only seen fediverse to describe it.
What is the worse case scenario for me, a person living on kbin? What the heck could they do to ever possibly affect us when we can just pull the plug on them anytime?
by user @[email protected]
If there’s one company you should preemptively block, it’s Facebook. They have a track record of destroying anything and everything they touch and there is zero reason to think it won’t be the same this time. From this post:
They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
they have more influence
It’s like blocking e-mails from Google. People can’t take a win.
Pretty cool at first glance. Not so cool when they have pulled in enough users and then remove the federation.
They have orders of magnitude more users than all Mastodon instances combined already.
Part of that is only because any and all Instagram accounts are also considered Threads accounts. I have a feeling active users is probably in a similar ballpark
BS. There are 140 mil Threads accounts and over 2 bil Instagram accounts. You can create Threads account with Instagram and for a time they couldn’t be decouple but that changed too.
Agreed. Instances always have the option to defederate with Threads should it prove spammy or ad-filled or socially awful, but I’m cautiously optimistic that Threads will pave the way for a more open social media paradigm in general. Decentralization is a core tenet of Web3, and everyone started focusing on the block chain and Bitcoins and whatnot but there’s so much more to decentralization than that.
Why in the world are you cautiously optimistic? What would give you the idea that meta would do anything but what’s in their shareholder’s interest. My biggest question is, do we know if activitypub is secure enough to keep them out of its software?
I don’t think it’s fair to preemptively assume meta is going to be evil here, where is the evidence?
If a bear was charging you that you had just watched murder a bunch of people would you just assume it was going to attack you? What evidence would you have for that?
Personally, I think large tech corporations have a wonderful track record with treating the public commons as a shared resource to nurture and maintain not a coal vein in the ground to ruthlessly extract :)
How convenient, I just posted this, lol.
https://wedistribute.org/2023/08/threads-new-terms-affects-the-fediverse/
Though this is more federation with a wheel and spoke model than true decentralization where each pier communicates with other piers directly. Each have their place for sure, but they cannot be interchanged because they are not the same thing.
I’m looking forward to federation. My stance on it is that I don’t want to use Threads, but I want to follow and interact with the people who do. Best of both worlds like this.
If true, I would expect this link to work, but it’s 404 at the time of this comment:
I’m surprised @[email protected] isn’t one of those select few accounts.
@[email protected] It would make sense for him to be but I guess it might be easier to use accounts that are not so much public knowledge like @[email protected] rather than the head of META themselves. Really hope if it goes well they will possibly even think about doing the same with there other platforms.
[email protected] is the head of Instagram and Threads and has 627k followers on Threads, so not exactly low-profile. I have my concerns about Meta’s intent here, but I do hope it goes well.
Less of a public figure than Zuck I was meant to say. I really do hope they have a goodish intent and I’m sure the Fediverse will keep on going with or without META, just really hope to see more of a general audience join us on the Fediverse
Testes nuts.
no
Idk if this is a good thing or not lmfao
Honestly I think this is good for the fediverse.
It instantly boosts mastodon and Pixelfed’s reach, which means people won’t dismiss posting there as it never gets seen.
I would never open a Threads account, but it unlocks seeing content from a lot of people I like who ditched Twitter but didn’t understand mastodon.
Yes, this can also be Embrace, Extend Extinguish, but I’m happy for the publicity.
If people don’t like it they can join an instance that defederatrs from Meta and that’s totally fine.
more content isn’t better content
And that’s why all social media is bad.
Look, open socials can either replace closed socials or be a niche little fun exclusive club for techheads exclusively focused on Star Trek and Linux and how open socials should replace closed socials. You can’t have both.
So if the conclusion here is that popular social media sucks… yeah, you’re right. Because all social media sucks. The content won’t be better if the same people join Mastodon than if they come from Threads.
I don’t agree at all here. If someone on threads has posts you like, you can follow them. If not, you won’t see any posts from threads on your feed.
Your feed will either be the same as before, or better than before.
am see by default
See what? Posts from threads? Depends on your instance and how you browse.
Lemmy has no microblogging features so you won’t be seeing any (unless they’re specifically posting to Lemmy)
Kbin I’m not too sure since there are microblogging features but idk how they work.
Mastodon; you will see posts from threads users if you follow them, or if someone you follow boosts a post from them.
If you browse by the explore/posts tab, you might see some threads posts. Also from the ‘All’/federated tab.
You’ll be able to block threads for your account, or choose an instance that’s defederated.am use kbin microblogging feature
No, not always, but there are people I know I like and respect and used to follow on Twitter that are on threads and I’m not.
will they go to mastodon
If enough people that they want to follow give them the “mastodon.social treatment” as I’m calling it (which basically means rejecting them based on being on an instance with a bad reputation) they might, they also might not. I know plenty of people who choose to stay on Mastodon.social even though they’re limited by lots of servers and users for spam. Same would probably happen with threads. Though I imagine there will be significantly more animosity towards threads than mastodon.social because threads is not just a bot infested mastodon instance, it’s run by Facebook.
