Meta/Instagram launched a new product called Threads today (working title project92). It adds a new interface for creating text posts and replying to them, using your Instagram account. Of note, Meta has stated that Threads plans to support ActivityPub in the future, and allow federation with ActivityPub services. If you actually look at your Threads profile page in the app your username has a threads.net tag next to it - presumably to support future federation.
Per the link, a number of fediverse communities are pledging to block any Meta-directed instances that should exist in the future. Thus instance content would not be federated to Meta instances, and Meta users would not be able to interact with instance content.
I’m curious what the opinions on this here are. I personally feel like Meta has shown time and time again that they are not very good citizens of the Internet; beyond concerns of an Eternal September triggered by federated Instagram, I worry that bringing their massive userbase to the fediverse would allow them to influence it to negative effect.
I also understand how that could be seen to go against the point of federated social media in the first place, and I’m eager to hear more opinions. What do you think?
Don’t you see how that would make e-mail worse for everyone that uses e-mail?
Imagine having an e-mail address but you couldn’t send an e-mail to your friend because for whatever reason your e-mail server decided to not block Gmail. That makes e-mail worse for everyone.
It’s the same here, we’re trying to get away from social media silos and move towards a protocol that lets everyone participate. The kneejerk reaction here is to just create a new silo that has different owners instead of just being part of a network that shares a protocol.
That only makes it worse today because Alphabet took over so much. It doesn’t make anything worse if they are never allowed to gain that level of dominance. When they get to the “Extinguish” phase it’s already too late.
Effectively, this is the same debate about big banks. Should they be allowed to get too big to fail? Should we just go along with whatever the titans want? If so, I expect the fediverse to be short lived and just another FAANG/MSFT product soon.
I agree that Meta will attempt to EEE Fediverse. I don’t think that they’re a positive actor in this space at all.
But, the move to defeat them isn’t to try to implement a blockade. There simply isn’t any way to ensure that everyone would comply and the people that don’t block Meta services will have access to billions of more potential users while the instances that do block Meta will find themselves as a backwater part of the Fediverse that the majority of the people on the planet cannot access from their existing social media account.
Right now Lemmy is made up of motivated and ideological people who were willing to leave Reddit because of the way it was being run. Having this group isolated from the networks that Meta is connected to is a positive thing for Meta. You would have all of the people who would be motivated to work against Meta’s interests cut off in an isolated pocket of the Fediverse unable to affect Meta.
Open software doesn’t have the userbase to strong arm Meta in this manner. The way you win is you outrun the Extend portion of the plan by creating software extensions that operate better than what Meta offers and use that to lure users off of Meta’s services. This is made massively easier by them being part of the same federated network. You’re no longer working against the Network Effect… users are unwilling to swap to new platforms because they lose access to their existing friends and content that they follow. This doesn’t happen if your instance is federated with Meta services… users can freely swap if the experience is better.
Lol, as a tangent, this is literally what it’s like trying to communicate with people in China. Everything from Email to XMPP you just have to try to figure out if the server can cross the great firewall. You’ve got to have 5x redundant background channels because sometimes one thing works on this wifi but not that wifi.
Am I allowed to say that here? Guess we’ll find out…
Actually interesting.
Imagine having a chat account but you couldn’t send a message to a friend because Google decided they didn’t need third party interaction anymore
Yeah, blocking is bad. It’s bad when Google does it and it would be bad if we did it.
I still use XMPP based chat services, Google’s move in this area doesn’t affect me at all because the protocol is open. ActivityPub is the same way… if Meta decides that they’re going to block all non-Meta instances then our instance isn’t affected. But as long as they’re federating with us then their users can freely switch to non-Meta services without losing access to their existing friends and communities. That would not be true if we defederated from Meta.
Beating Meta has to be done by providing a better service, not by taking a tiny percentage of their population and hiding in a bubble on the Fediverse. Meta already has the user base, they’re not worried about losing a few million users (especially ones who’re ideologically motivated to oppose them).
The best move at this point is to stay federated and to rapidly update ActivityPub to provide more features. We have to out-Extend them, we cannot prevent the ‘Embrace’ part of the strategy… the existing Fediverse userbase is too small compared to Meta’s users base.