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fer0n @lemm.ee

Threads Has Begun Federating Via ActivityPub

Adam Mosseri:

Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.

140 comments

  • Anyone who doesn't understand that connecting in any way to Facebook is not a good thing .... is either very naive, or complicit to wanting to take down the fediverse.

    Facebook already has enough content and enough of a platform on their own -- they literally control half of the worldwide social media network. Why do they want to spread into this new space?

    The only reason they want to be on this side is to conquer or destroy.

    • This perspective of "Either you agree with me or you're complicit in a conspiracy against me" is incredibly childish and immature.

      Sometimes people have different opinions than you. Try to find a way to deal with it.

    • Your Mastodon data is already an open book to Meta if they care to have it. The protocol is open, they could already be black-ops scooping up everything that's fit to federate without turning on Threads federation, so them doing that really changes nothing. And what I mean by that is that they could already have set up unknown instances to leech whatever data they want out of the Fediverse, which instances masquerade as normal mom and pop installs just federating and sucking up everything without bringing anything back to the table. There's literally nothing stopping them from leeching everything out of the Fediverse at any time other than people being better at detecting their activity (and actively thwarting that activity) than Meta is at keeping it off the radar.

      In this case they're making it so that I might have a chance to follow and interact with people already in the Meta/Instagram/Threads atmosphere without having to convince those people to leave the confines of what they're comfortable with and find a Mastodon instance to sign up for. Maybe they'll be more comfortable with leaving Meta after dipping their toes in the open spec?

      How is that not a win? If Meta/Threads decide that they want to fracture the protocol and go do their own thing later, so what? We'll go right back to where we were before they brought their users into the Fediverse. If people decide that they value the Threads extras/connections more than they value the purity of the ActivityPub protocol then maybe Meta is actually providing something that matters and we've lost by not supplying that need before the corporate interest figured out that it existed. In that case we'll deserve the death that causes in use of the open spec, but the open spec will still be there and people who want to do their own thing with it can't be stopped now. The code to run an open ActivityPub Mastodon instance is already out there and it's impossible to take it back now.

      Everyone is out here decrying this as a subtle takeover of the Fediverse by Meta, but did Facebook "takeover" the HTTP spec when they started operating facebook (dot) com on the world wide web over the HTTP protocol? It's an insane assertion. I've been running my own opensource web servers since well before Facebook was a thing and I've continued to do so despite most people opting to depend on a mega-corp to be steward of their online presence. That Meta has a very successful and popular website that I've never been a fan of has never impacted my ability to use the open protocol they operate on to continue doing my own thing. The same thing will be true here.

      It really seems like people are just upset that Threads might bring ActivityPub to the mainstream and force them to contend with the realization that a diaspora of open spec implementations already lost the war to Meta/Facebook. We had that once before. It was called the World Wide Web and you could go and find forums, fan pages, company websites, and everything else back then that has since moved to Facebook (or other content aggregator sites) because people value the network effects and homogenization more than they care about one big company being in charge of it all. (...and not to belabor the point, but most of that stuff is still out there, it's just waned in popularity because the network effects are not there.) Here we are with a chance to try and break things out again and people are seemingly worried that we can't if we let the Meta users in? Maybe they're right, maybe it's impossible to achieve victory here, but gatekeeping the standard and enacting some purity test for which providers are allowed on the protocol isn't going to tip the scales in favor of the open standards implementation.

      If the protocol is truly open, then how can a corporation embracing it be a danger? We're all free to adopt any changes or not at any point in the journey so it's impossible to lose, you're free to keep doing your own thing any way you look at it. Tell me how any of this is untrue.

      TL;DR: Threads coming to the Fediverse is a good thing. It'll make it possible to expand the network effects of an open protocol far faster and more than any amount of Fedinerds proselyting the gospel of ActivityPub ever will. The only thing that is at risk of being lost is that we'll refuse to adapt to what end users want fast enough to keep a large corporation from bending the spec to their ends. Which loss again only means that you'd be cutting yourself off from those who WANT to embrace the revised spec by not adopting those changes yourself. That option (to just not adopt changes to the spec) can't be taken away from you in the future, so worrying is only warranted if you feel like your ideal ActivityPub implementation can't win out in the marketplace of ideas and that you're owed that victory even if others are able to expand it in ways that people actually want to use enough to dismiss whatever downsides it contains.

    • Tell that to @Gargron@mastodon.social (the creator of Mastdon, AFAIK). He's very excited about this. And I can't honestly understand why.

      https://mstdn.social/@Gargron@mastodon.social/111576826633308486

      • Well he's not alone ... a number of relatively vocal "fedi-advocates" are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.

        Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where "we" are up to.

        From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves "the good guys" and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating "significant" technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They're all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.

        When face-to-face with the prospect of having "your thing" accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. "Growing the protocol" and "growing" mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.

        This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they're "the good guys" and don't work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their "ethical-tech" world ... the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.

        Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer "growth" might completely miss the point especially if it's by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.

        And this is where I'm up to on this issue ... both sides seem not to be talking about it much.

        What is the "emotional", "social fabric", "vibes and feelings" factor in all this ... that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens ... when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL's loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I'm betting most will feel off ... like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit ... passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves ... "what was the point of coming here in the first place?".

        Now, to be real, it's not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it's an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won't be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that's unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? ... that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it'd rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)

        Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they're willing to drink for their ends.

        For my purposes ... I don't think I'll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens ... the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it ... I'd rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.

      • Yea I was really confused to read that. I’m on Kbin / Lemmy significantly more than I log in to Mastadon (I think I’ve opened that app 5 times in the past year), so now I guess I’ll just delete Mastadon.

        I bet he’s getting a big bag of money.

  • I have no interest in interacting with Threads myself, but I suppose it's good news for people who want to be on the fediverse but just can't manage going without being able to follow @burgerking@threads.net or whatever.

  • The Wig punched himself through a couple of African backwaters and felt like a shark cruising a swimming pool thick with caviar. Not that any one of those tasty tiny eggs amounted to much, but you could just open wide and scoop, and it was easy and filling and it added up. The Wig worked the Africans for a week, incidentally bringing about the collapse of at least three governments and causing untold human suffering. At the end of his week, fat with the cream of several million laughably tiny bank accounts, he retired. As he was going out, the locusts were coming in; other people had gotten the African idea.

    • Count Zero - William Gibson

    They just need the data. It’s available, all they need to do is open wide and scoop.

    • Maybe I’m not getting something here, but neither Mastodon nor Lemmy are private, you can find everything open for everyone already, so how would federation change something there? Federation doesn’t mean everyone would use their app, so they wouldn’t gain any app usage analytics.

      Also I don’t get how your metaphor make sense. The amount of fediverse users is a rounding error next to threads, instagram, WhatsApp and facebook. So there’s not a "lot a tiny things that can add up", only a small amount of tiny things which don’t really add up to anything.

      • We’re pretty much agreeing here. I don’t think them federating out makes much of a difference. They get the data from the reverse for free. They only have to scoop, and it’s worth almost noting individually.

        But that’s their current game. Has been for a long time. Serving one ad is a tiny thing. But they add up.

        However, them wanting to federate indicates they see the fediverse as something worth noting and paying attention to, possibly even joining. That’s not nothing.

        They either think:

        1. The fediverse will grow with or without them, and without them it’s a potential threat, due to loss of control
        2. The fediverse has potential that they want to water and help grow so they can prune it and shape it to become something valuable to them
        3. They can “try genuinely” to join the fediverse, and elicit a response that maims it

        That response can come in many forms.

        If they provoke a backlash of defederation (done), that causes devision and argument. They win by shattering the potential threat before it can grow.

        If they are allowed to join and become a large voice and eventually be like gmail to email, big enough to have control and provide the filtering people are already (quietly, carefully) asking for. All they need to do is to offer “spam filters” and a “personal feed” and we have Facebook 2.0 and they don’t even have to foot most of the server bills.

        I’m not sure how to win this, but there’s a lot of ways to lose it.

140 comments