There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.
This reads as incredibly condescending, naive and duplicitous, filled with hubris.
For starters, the whole “yeah sure XMPP got EEE’d but who cares, only nerds cared about that, lol” is not only false (e.g. Jabber), but also does nothing to quell concerns.
Here’s an account by someone who was in the XMPP trenches when Google started adopting it.
Notice something? The “omg so cool!”, this is exactly the same as Rochko.
It’s the hubris when you’re a FOSS maintainer who toiled away for years without recognition and now a $700B+ corporation is flattering him by wanting to use/interact with his work.
Then there’s the fact that Rochko is extremely tight lipped about the off the record meeting with Meta and consistently refuses to deny having received funds from Meta and refuses to pledge not to accept any funds from Meta.
I genuinely think the dude is just so hyped for the perceived recognition, that he lost the thread.
So much so that he thinks Mastodon is untouchable.
And it’s extremely naive to think that Meta has benevolent motives here or that Mastodon will survive any schemes Meta might have.
What’s more realistic is that Mastodon will die because people will flock to Threads if their social graph has moved over.
Similarly these lofty and naive ideas that people on Threads will make the switch to Mastodon once they get a taste of what it has to offer.
So now all of a sudden the “difficulty” to get started in Mastodon, that is keeping people who want a polished corporate experience away isn’t going to be an issue?
Especially when in the “extinguish” phase Meta will have siloed off from Mastodon and its portability function, having to leave their social graph behind?
It’s all so increasingly naive, one can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional sabotage at this point.
Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality.
Sure perhaps years from now a few hundred to a few thousand people might still use it, but it will be as irrelevant as XMPP is to most people, and Rochko with it.
Data scraping
Meta is an ad company and tries to collect as much data from anyone. They are known to make shadow graphs of people not even in their network to try and know as much about as many people possible. This is their business model so they will do it to the fedi.
Moneyed interests
They are going to compensate instances that federate with them, which turns people that run instances from volunteers into business owners. From there they can try and dilute admins further into showing ads etc.
Sucking users from the fediverse
They will make it easy to get in (import with history when mastodon does not support it), hard to get out (if you go, you can’t take your posts) and will hold your connections hostage against you (we will stop fedarating with the other instances now, so if you want to connect to your friends you have to have a threads account, sorry not sorry).
That and basically all the shit big corps do like make people angry and hacking people’s brains to stay on the site for as long as fucking possible. Which they are 100% going to try to do here regardless of our intentions.
Ultimately the fediverse is still an experiment. It clearly works, and in isolation many of the services (Lemmy, Matrix, etc.) work well enough on their own.
I’m not optimistic about anything at this point. The fediverse might die; it might not.
There could be huge incentives for them to convert Mastodon users over to Threads, based on their internal analytics, in which case the headache would be worth it.
Meta won’t be dead anytime soon, but it’s clear that they’ve made some risky plays, which means their decisions are going to continuously be less risky.
Can’t make money with the information that is public, they need the social connections to people that will see ads. They want to know our interests, and the interests of all the people we interact with. They don’t give a duck about IPs or emails, they can’t monetize those. So they will keep databases on all users and their connections and their interests all so they can show more appropriate ads. If they’re on the connected fediverse they’ll keep all that too, just in case. And any government can get this info if they ask for it.
#2 there is evidence of them wanting to do that. I’ll look up the thread on mastodon later (I’m on mobile rn).
#3 is a difficult one. I really don’t know why they even want this. I suspected it was to get active users on their initial timeline, but I guess that wasn’t that important to them after all. But there is a real chance of them stopping the growth of the fediverse or even minimizing the size and influence, simply to remove a competitor. Everything is better to them than having users calm down in a relaxing social media environment that is non toxic and could make them all obsolete and kill the whole social media industry’s MO
Far too many people in this thread seem to not understand that everything they post here is on the open, public internet, and it’s infuriating.
The data is already public. The cat pictures are already public. Those pictures of food you posted on Instagram are public. All of those posts you put on Facebook with your real name and political beliefs and pictures of your family and social security number are public.
It’s only not public if you choose to lock it down with permissions, but all that does is make it public to the corporation you don’t trust. The Fediverse doesn’t have that feature because they already know it’s fucking pointless. Everything is a third-party server and nobody should trust any of the servers they post on.
If you don’t want it to be public, don’t post the message!
Excellent post, and it is truly heartbreaking stuff. We know Eugen signed an NDA with Meta which just seals the deal for me given the other refusals to answer basic questions. I think he is probably a person who is finding validation for something he’s worked on for a very long time, and Meta is blinding him. But that’s what they do. They are emotional manipulators by trade.
Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality
This is exactly what happened with RCS. Sure, it is an open standard. But Google EEE’d it by adding proprietary functionality using their near unlimited budget and influence, then built it all around their own proprietary middleware, like Jive, to lock out others. Some of the most popular messaging apps, including Signal, had been begging Google for RCS access for years. Google refuses, because they firmly control it now. Only a handful of partners get to access the supposedly “open” standard which Google has co-opted. Sure, you could pour resources into the old, unmaintained RCS standard from over a decade ago. Before Google essentially killed it by moving proprietary and snuffing it out. But then it wouldn’t work with Google’s RCS, and Google’s RCS is what people know as RCS at this point.
Meta will do the same thing with ActivityPub specifically, and decentralized social media in general. They will EEE their way to the finish line. They will wall it all off and prevent account portability and cross-communication outside of a preferred partner network. I could see them walling it off to the Meta-owned properties as they seek ways to further tie Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp together under a common protocol which they’ve EEE’d.
Could you explain more about IBM? I’m not as tech literate and I’ve been barely keeping up with the conversations about federation and EEE, what’s going on with IBM?
IBM bought RedHat, and recently decided to take ther code repos for RedHat Enterprise Linux semiprivate. They still have to offer the source code to people they give the compiled product to, but they don’t have to give it publically, even though it is open source. Their claim is that they didn’t like others profiting off their work by rebuilding the source an selling it. Of course RedHat seems to now be ignoring the rather large amount of open source code they didn’t write that they are selling, like the Linux kernel.
You could say this about literally any big tech company.
Ultimately it’s up for humanity to decide what it values most.
A lot of people are sick of BT, but so many are locked into their services and they don’t have much capacity to change at the moment, so until that infrastructure for switching evolves it’s going to be a while before anything really changes.
It’s just as likely though that there are enough people who are indifferent too, which then implies that BT has a higher likelihood of doing what it does.
Too much is happening right now for any real projection to be made. Best we let this settle for a minute.
The whole XMPP was used by nerds thing really showed how full of hubris he is, agreed.
This is going to end in a disaster, and this blog post from him will be linked at for decades to come to try and warn the next generation the next time we need to do something like this.
This reads as incredibly condescending, naive and duplicitous, filled with hubris.
For starters, the whole “yeah sure XMPP got EEE’d but who cares, only nerds cared about that, lol” is not only false (e.g. Jabber), but also does nothing to quell concerns.
Here’s an account by someone who was in the XMPP trenches when Google started adopting it.
Notice something? The “omg so cool!”, this is exactly the same as Rochko.
It’s the hubris when you’re a FOSS maintainer who toiled away for years without recognition and now a $700B+ corporation is flattering him by wanting to use/interact with his work.
The blog is a far cry from the anti-corporate tone in the informational video from 2018.
Then there’s the fact that Rochko is extremely tight lipped about the off the record meeting with Meta and consistently refuses to deny having received funds from Meta and refuses to pledge not to accept any funds from Meta.
There’s also the unsatisfactory answer he gave to people who started questioning some dubious sponsors and the fact that he rushed to lock the thread, killing any further discussion.
I genuinely think the dude is just so hyped for the perceived recognition, that he lost the thread.
So much so that he thinks Mastodon is untouchable.
And it’s extremely naive to think that Meta has benevolent motives here or that Mastodon will survive any schemes Meta might have.
What’s more realistic is that Mastodon will die because people will flock to Threads if their social graph has moved over.
Similarly these lofty and naive ideas that people on Threads will make the switch to Mastodon once they get a taste of what it has to offer.
So now all of a sudden the “difficulty” to get started in Mastodon, that is keeping people who want a polished corporate experience away isn’t going to be an issue?
Especially when in the “extinguish” phase Meta will have siloed off from Mastodon and its portability function, having to leave their social graph behind?
It’s all so increasingly naive, one can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional sabotage at this point.
Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality.
Sure perhaps years from now a few hundred to a few thousand people might still use it, but it will be as irrelevant as XMPP is to most people, and Rochko with it.
@[email protected] in 2 years.
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The problems I personally have with Meta are:
That and basically all the shit big corps do like make people angry and hacking people’s brains to stay on the site for as long as fucking possible. Which they are 100% going to try to do here regardless of our intentions.
deleted by creator
Ultimately the fediverse is still an experiment. It clearly works, and in isolation many of the services (Lemmy, Matrix, etc.) work well enough on their own.
I’m not optimistic about anything at this point. The fediverse might die; it might not.
There could be huge incentives for them to convert Mastodon users over to Threads, based on their internal analytics, in which case the headache would be worth it.
Meta won’t be dead anytime soon, but it’s clear that they’ve made some risky plays, which means their decisions are going to continuously be less risky.
Can’t make money with the information that is public, they need the social connections to people that will see ads. They want to know our interests, and the interests of all the people we interact with. They don’t give a duck about IPs or emails, they can’t monetize those. So they will keep databases on all users and their connections and their interests all so they can show more appropriate ads. If they’re on the connected fediverse they’ll keep all that too, just in case. And any government can get this info if they ask for it.
#2 there is evidence of them wanting to do that. I’ll look up the thread on mastodon later (I’m on mobile rn).
#3 is a difficult one. I really don’t know why they even want this. I suspected it was to get active users on their initial timeline, but I guess that wasn’t that important to them after all. But there is a real chance of them stopping the growth of the fediverse or even minimizing the size and influence, simply to remove a competitor. Everything is better to them than having users calm down in a relaxing social media environment that is non toxic and could make them all obsolete and kill the whole social media industry’s MO
couldn’t they data scrape without creating a new social network platform
Far too many people in this thread seem to not understand that everything they post here is on the open, public internet, and it’s infuriating.
The data is already public. The cat pictures are already public. Those pictures of food you posted on Instagram are public. All of those posts you put on Facebook with your real name and political beliefs and pictures of your family and social security number are public.
It’s only not public if you choose to lock it down with permissions, but all that does is make it public to the corporation you don’t trust. The Fediverse doesn’t have that feature because they already know it’s fucking pointless. Everything is a third-party server and nobody should trust any of the servers they post on.
If you don’t want it to be public, don’t post the message!
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I disagree with your threat assessment, but thanks for that link, it was indeed a good read.
The sanest comment here.
Excellent post, and it is truly heartbreaking stuff. We know Eugen signed an NDA with Meta which just seals the deal for me given the other refusals to answer basic questions. I think he is probably a person who is finding validation for something he’s worked on for a very long time, and Meta is blinding him. But that’s what they do. They are emotional manipulators by trade.
This is exactly what happened with RCS. Sure, it is an open standard. But Google EEE’d it by adding proprietary functionality using their near unlimited budget and influence, then built it all around their own proprietary middleware, like Jive, to lock out others. Some of the most popular messaging apps, including Signal, had been begging Google for RCS access for years. Google refuses, because they firmly control it now. Only a handful of partners get to access the supposedly “open” standard which Google has co-opted. Sure, you could pour resources into the old, unmaintained RCS standard from over a decade ago. Before Google essentially killed it by moving proprietary and snuffing it out. But then it wouldn’t work with Google’s RCS, and Google’s RCS is what people know as RCS at this point.
Meta will do the same thing with ActivityPub specifically, and decentralized social media in general. They will EEE their way to the finish line. They will wall it all off and prevent account portability and cross-communication outside of a preferred partner network. I could see them walling it off to the Meta-owned properties as they seek ways to further tie Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp together under a common protocol which they’ve EEE’d.
This is why God invented GPL. With GPL, you don’t get to do that.
For example, right now, IBM is in the process of learning very hard lessons why they don’t get to do that.
Could you explain more about IBM? I’m not as tech literate and I’ve been barely keeping up with the conversations about federation and EEE, what’s going on with IBM?
IBM bought RedHat, and recently decided to take ther code repos for RedHat Enterprise Linux semiprivate. They still have to offer the source code to people they give the compiled product to, but they don’t have to give it publically, even though it is open source. Their claim is that they didn’t like others profiting off their work by rebuilding the source an selling it. Of course RedHat seems to now be ignoring the rather large amount of open source code they didn’t write that they are selling, like the Linux kernel.
Yup, and very little people realize that almost all RCS implementations are by Google (often via their Jibe service).
You could say this about literally any big tech company.
Ultimately it’s up for humanity to decide what it values most.
A lot of people are sick of BT, but so many are locked into their services and they don’t have much capacity to change at the moment, so until that infrastructure for switching evolves it’s going to be a while before anything really changes.
It’s just as likely though that there are enough people who are indifferent too, which then implies that BT has a higher likelihood of doing what it does.
Too much is happening right now for any real projection to be made. Best we let this settle for a minute.
The whole XMPP was used by nerds thing really showed how full of hubris he is, agreed.
This is going to end in a disaster, and this blog post from him will be linked at for decades to come to try and warn the next generation the next time we need to do something like this.
And the cycle will repeat.
@[email protected] 1 year