Remote View

2y ago

Instagram joins the Fediverse

Why isn't anyone talking about this? It looks like Meta wants to compete with Twitter with a new Instagram microblogging app which will probably be compatible with Mastodon

Key Point of the article:

*“Soon, our app will be compatible with certain other apps like Mastodon,” Instagram’s slide says. “Users on these other apps will be able to search for, follow and interact with your profile and content if you’re public, or if you’re private and approve them as followers.” *

The Verge - This is Instagram’s new Twitter competitor

To The Fediverse @discuss.online

jgrim @discuss.online

2y ago

Instagram joins the Fediverse

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64 comments

Instagram was the last one I expected to join the fediverse. They actually actively blocked 3rd party clients before and even shut them down.
- They said it is going to work with Mastodon but we don't know if they are going to federate it. They are most likely to do so since they are actively talking about "decentralization" but who knows
  
  In the article it says that people from Mastodon are able to interact with this. So it kinda seams like they are just making a new frontend based and their own instance of Mastodon. We just don't know if we are able to access their instance without their app.
- My guess is that meta sees another one of their social media sites go down the drain and this time they want to try something to stop it.
  
  My guess is that they want to use the already established userbase of Mastodon as a starting point. There's going to be more content from the start and also more users. If they would make a new app with no users they would need to start from scratch which is more risky.

I don't see this as a good thing. I see it as a logical step after the success of the fediverse. But I am afraid of how it will develop, with more commercial participants in fedi.
- The only issues I can think of is that a mass adoption of the ActivityPub protocol would also bring plenty of spam accounts
  
  @superuserdo
  @sexypeach
  As it comes naturally with every growing platform

It's not instagram itself, but a new app made by instagram
- Why does that even have the same name if the app is different lmao
  
  It doesn't have any official name yet, but from what is known it would indeed be a separate app
- by instagram
  Isn't Instagram owned by Facebook / Meta?> test
  
  yup

I don't trust anything that comes from proprietary platforms. Anything they do is for their benefits

Time to break out the block cannon. Ain't no way that I let anything Zuck touches touch my stuff.

Anyone remembers Embrace - Extend - Extinguish? I don't expect this to be anything but an effort to crush a potential competitor
- That might be an issue but I don't know how something like this might be appliable in such a platform
  
  Quoting from the article:
  The strategy's three phases are:
  Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
  Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the "simple" standard.
  Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
  This has been done for open protocols by other companies before, many, MANY times. They're likely going to "joyfully embrace" the Fediverse, add some "improvements" that will be proprietary and only run on their software, then when people become addicted to "Meta Fediverse", close things down dramatically so that people only run their stuff. We must prevent that bullshit.

PixelFed!

@superuserdo
I blocked Twitter RTs on here and will happily block Instagram rubbish as well.

So when's it releasing?
- Probably in june

Can people create their own instances of this app? Even if it can interoperate with other fediverse software, if this ends up being yet another big tech platform where your only choice is to use the one hosted by Meta it defeats the point.
- As far as I've understood, it's a matter of embracing a new technological "trend" and lowering the management and maintenance costs so it's almost certain that some kind of self-hosting option will be available. I just hope it's not going to work like Bluesky which is not actually decentralized and always relies to the Bluesky infrastructure
- @CannotSleep420 @superuserdo I can't see your point. The point of fedi is to not be locked to a single implementation. If one software is proprietary and does not allow you to host your own, you can just use another you like. Since all actors interoperate regardless of software they use, then it does not matter if you cannot host your own Instagram.
  
  @CannotSleep420 @superuserdo we can use for example @pixelfed instead since it has the same feature set.
  
  I can’t see your point. The point of fedi is to not be locked to a single implementation. If one software is proprietary and does not allow you to host your own, you can just use another you like.
  That's basically what I'm getting at. Part of the point of the fediverse is being able to choose both the software you use and the instances you use. I presume that the fediverse compatible instagram app will only be hosted by Meta. If someone is interested in getting into the fediverse for the freedom and choice, why would they use the new instagram as opposed to another fedi software with a similar feature set, such as Pixelfed like you pointed out?

It's talking about a new app made by Meta. Key point from article:
“Soon, our app will be compatible with certain other apps like Mastodon,” Instagram’s slide says. “Users on these other apps will be able to search for, follow and interact with your profile and content if you’re public, or if you’re private and approve them as followers.”
- Yes we just don't know the extent of the federation. We'll see

@superuserdo @raucao “Users on these other apps will be able to search for […]“ written by someone who never spent a minute on Mastodon
- I just cited the article
  
  @superuserdo I know. And I’m sure the article cited an internal slide, made by someone who hasn’t heard about the Mastodon community’s attitude towards search

But Instagram is part of Meta. It's just as bad as Facebook, Whatsapp or any other Meta product when it comes to privacy and it will never be FOSS, so very much unlike Mastodon
- Yup, but people are going to try it because "bro the new Instagram thingy", after that we can tell them "bro did you know you can access the same content without being spied?
  If there's a thing I've learnt in the past year is that people don't want to talk about privacy and FOSS software, mainly because the word "privacy" has been so overused in the past 10/15 years that most people think it's bullshit which doesn't exist anymore. It's a preconcept but unfortunately that's how people think and if you want them to consider free software juust tell them it's cool before everything else

Insert meme: "You remember gtalk which was part of the Jabber/XMPP federation? Pepperidge farms remembers"

If this happens, will Instagram users be able to follow accounts from the fediverse, or would this just be a way for non-Instagram users to fetch content from the platform?
It's not really clear to me what this means in a practical sense, either. Would the volume of content generated by Instagram overwhelm the existing infrastructure on most instances of Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin? I'm not sure what kind of caching requirements there are for posts (especially with images), but I could see that being a challenge.

64 comments