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.
I read your comment before I read the blog post and I have to say, I am finding it hard to align it with what’s in the blog.
Aside from the hand-waving comment about XMPP, he does a great job of explaining how everything works, and based on my understanding of the fediverse and its architecture, its all true.
I dont understand what people think should happen here. If a large corporation wants to join, then there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. Its an open protocol. If you want to use Threads, join. If you dont, don’t. If you want your server to defederate, tell your admin or join a defederated instance. If you want to federate, tell your admin or join an instance that’s federated. If you want to control your own destiny completely, self-host.
There is tons of choice here and the way it’s architected, several layers of protection. I dont get this moral panic everyone has. This is quite literally the point of a decentralized social network.
At the end of the day, if a large corporation joining the network, kills it, then it was destined to be destroyed from the beginning.
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.
They can, and are probably already doing, #1 right now. As are Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Apple, DuckDuck, OpenAi, etc. All of the comments and profiles are public information which means literally anyone on the web can see it and do <insert nefarious or not nefarious thing here> with it. As the blog post says, they don’t get anything else though like IP or email–only your home instance gets that. Everything else they can already get with their webcrawlers.
#2. There is no evidence that they plan on doing that. This is a slippery slope argument (which is a logical fallacy). And so what if they do that? Don’t join that instance. Migrate to a different instance. Ruud could add ads to lemmy.world today.
#3. Then let those users go. How does that impact you or the fediverse? Are all of your friends on Mastodon or Lemmy now? I seriously doubt it. Do they all need to be? If people leave to go to Threads…then what? They could go to Tildes, Bluesky, or any other service right now. If the service is more appealing and aligns with their values then they’ll leave for it (or join it as well). Who cares? The value proposition of the fediverse is that no one entity controls it and you have nearly infinite choice to do whatever the hell you want. Threads may never federate at all. Part of me wonders why they would. Why would they care about the 12M people on mastodon right now vs the 2.3 BILLION instagram users? If they convert 10% of those into Threads users, they’ll dwarf Mastodon, so what incentive would they have to federate? It seems like it would be more of a headache for them than a benefit.
You can tilt at every windmill you see or you can enjoy the fediverse and make it a place you and your friends want to spend time.
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!
Its obvious you have some strong feelings about this and it sounds like they come from you wanting Mastodon and the fedivserse to thrive. I respect that. I’ve enjoyed my time here so far. It would be a shame if it got torpedo’d by a big corp (especially a shitty one like Facebook).
That said, I don’t think anyone has rolled out the red carpet. The FOSS guy’s response is great, but meeting with them cost Eugen nothing(except maybe your goodwill). The fact that there was an NDA is a nothingburger. People sign those ALL-THE-TIME. It doesn’t mean anything nefarious is happening and it doesn’t mean Eugen has “gone to the dark side”. It’s definitely not “rolling out the red carpet”.
I’ve also seen a lot of jumping to conclusions and fantastical strawmen at the bottom of everyone’s slippery slope arguments. A few of your numbered points would fall into that conclusion jumping bucket, and some of your other points are based on an, imo, misunderstanding of the users of the fediverse.
For instance, #3 and #5 don’t give this community enough credit. The bulk of the people on the fediverse are big proponents of free and open internet, privacy, foss, etc. Most are refugees of Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook to begin with–they aren’t just hopping back in bed with Facebook.
And to that point, why would they all of the sudden care about the social media all of their friends are on? I can almost guarantee that their “normie” friends aren’t on the fediverse. The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.
Like I said, I just dont get the outrage. Keep on trucking in the fediverse with the community thats here and stop spending so much time Chicken Little-ing.
I read your comment before I read the blog post and I have to say, I am finding it hard to align it with what’s in the blog.
Aside from the hand-waving comment about XMPP, he does a great job of explaining how everything works, and based on my understanding of the fediverse and its architecture, its all true.
I dont understand what people think should happen here. If a large corporation wants to join, then there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. Its an open protocol. If you want to use Threads, join. If you dont, don’t. If you want your server to defederate, tell your admin or join a defederated instance. If you want to federate, tell your admin or join an instance that’s federated. If you want to control your own destiny completely, self-host.
There is tons of choice here and the way it’s architected, several layers of protection. I dont get this moral panic everyone has. This is quite literally the point of a decentralized social network.
At the end of the day, if a large corporation joining the network, kills it, then it was destined to be destroyed from the beginning.
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.
They can, and are probably already doing, #1 right now. As are Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Apple, DuckDuck, OpenAi, etc. All of the comments and profiles are public information which means literally anyone on the web can see it and do <insert nefarious or not nefarious thing here> with it. As the blog post says, they don’t get anything else though like IP or email–only your home instance gets that. Everything else they can already get with their webcrawlers.
#2. There is no evidence that they plan on doing that. This is a slippery slope argument (which is a logical fallacy). And so what if they do that? Don’t join that instance. Migrate to a different instance. Ruud could add ads to lemmy.world today.
#3. Then let those users go. How does that impact you or the fediverse? Are all of your friends on Mastodon or Lemmy now? I seriously doubt it. Do they all need to be? If people leave to go to Threads…then what? They could go to Tildes, Bluesky, or any other service right now. If the service is more appealing and aligns with their values then they’ll leave for it (or join it as well). Who cares? The value proposition of the fediverse is that no one entity controls it and you have nearly infinite choice to do whatever the hell you want. Threads may never federate at all. Part of me wonders why they would. Why would they care about the 12M people on mastodon right now vs the 2.3 BILLION instagram users? If they convert 10% of those into Threads users, they’ll dwarf Mastodon, so what incentive would they have to federate? It seems like it would be more of a headache for them than a benefit.
You can tilt at every windmill you see or you can enjoy the fediverse and make it a place you and your friends want to spend time.
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!
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Its obvious you have some strong feelings about this and it sounds like they come from you wanting Mastodon and the fedivserse to thrive. I respect that. I’ve enjoyed my time here so far. It would be a shame if it got torpedo’d by a big corp (especially a shitty one like Facebook).
That said, I don’t think anyone has rolled out the red carpet. The FOSS guy’s response is great, but meeting with them cost Eugen nothing(except maybe your goodwill). The fact that there was an NDA is a nothingburger. People sign those ALL-THE-TIME. It doesn’t mean anything nefarious is happening and it doesn’t mean Eugen has “gone to the dark side”. It’s definitely not “rolling out the red carpet”.
I’ve also seen a lot of jumping to conclusions and fantastical strawmen at the bottom of everyone’s slippery slope arguments. A few of your numbered points would fall into that conclusion jumping bucket, and some of your other points are based on an, imo, misunderstanding of the users of the fediverse.
For instance, #3 and #5 don’t give this community enough credit. The bulk of the people on the fediverse are big proponents of free and open internet, privacy, foss, etc. Most are refugees of Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook to begin with–they aren’t just hopping back in bed with Facebook.
And to that point, why would they all of the sudden care about the social media all of their friends are on? I can almost guarantee that their “normie” friends aren’t on the fediverse. The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.
Like I said, I just dont get the outrage. Keep on trucking in the fediverse with the community thats here and stop spending so much time Chicken Little-ing.
edit: Oh for what its worth: https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing Thats a hilarious read about Threads and why its already pretty lame.
deleted by creator
I disagree with your threat assessment, but thanks for that link, it was indeed a good read.
The sanest comment here.