Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse
Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse
What's Meta up to?
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Embrace ActivityPub, , Mastodon, and the fediverse
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Extend ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse with a very-usable app that provides additional functionality (initially the ability to follow everybody you're following on Instagram, and to communicate with all Threads users) that isn't available to the rest of the fediverse – as well over time providing additional services and introducing incompatibilities and non-standard improvements to the protocol
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Exploit ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse by utilizing them for profit – and also using them selfishly for Meta's own ends
Since the fediverse is so much smaller than Threads, the most obvious ways of exploiting it – such as stealing market share by getting people currently in the fediverse to move to Threads – aren't going to work. But exploitation is one of Meta's core competences, and once you start to look at it with that lens, it's easy to see some of the ways even their initial announcement and tiny first steps are exploiting the fediverse: making Threads feel like a more compelling platform, and reshaping regulation. Longer term, it's a great opportunity for Meta to explore – and maybe invest in – shifting their business model to decentralized surveillance capitalism.
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None of those things sounds inherently bad to me.
They might not be inherently bad, but they'll be likely bad depending on how it's done, and Facebook isn't to be trusted.
Just for the sake of example:
- What if Threads develops features that work well with the ActivityPub protocol, but since they're closed-source they cannot be implemented by Mastodon instances?
- What if Threads implements asymmetric federation - where Threads users can interact with outsiders' content, but outsiders cannot interact with Threads' content?
- What if Threads has some bullshit term of agreement like "by using our platform you agree to have your data collected, and if you're seeing this you're already using our platform"?
- etc.
Note that Facebook has a long story of user-hostile decisions; as in, this crap wouldn't be below its moral standards. So, while most of the time this would be FUD, in this case it's just F, no uncertainty or doubt.
Exactly. And they've already done your second and third bullets!
What specific features do you have in mind that could be implemented in a closed-source manner that couldn't be reverse-engineered and implemented by open-source instance software too? It's not easy to come up with such a thing, and it's unclear what benefit it would serve Meta that they can't accomplish by just not joining the Fediverse in the first place.
If Threads implements asymmetric federation, I'll shrug and ignore them because I'll never see their content and it won't ever affect me.
Doesn't Threads already have a bullshit terms of service? That's my default assumption for any website, really. But even if they don't, ActivityPub is an open protocol and so of course my data is being collected by who-knows-how-many organizations already. Meta doesn't need to do anything new at all to get access to it.
Sorry for the wall of text.
What specific features do you have in mind that could be implemented in a closed-source manner that couldn’t be reverse-engineered and implemented by open-source instance software too?
The features don't need to be impossible to reverse engineer; they could be costly enough to do so, rely on other FB/Meta platforms, or demand server capabilities past what you'd expect from typical Mastodon instances. For example:
- implementing some data format that is decoded by the front-end
- allowing you to access content from FB/IG/WhatsApp from Threads
- "we now allow big arse videos".
and it’s unclear what benefit it would serve Meta that they can’t accomplish by just not joining the Fediverse in the first place.
Killing a bird and a baby mammoth with a single stone, before they grow and invade your turf.
On one side you have Twitter/X; it bleeds money and Musk is an idiot, but he has enough money to throw at the problems until they go away, and he has a "vishun" about an "errything app" that would clearly compete with FB/IG/WhatsApp. On another you have the Fediverse; it's small and negligible but it has potential for unrestricted growth, and already includes things like Matrix (that competes with WhatsApp) and Friendica (that competes with FB).
From Meta's point of view, Twitter/X is by far the biggest threat. It could be addressed without federation, but by doing so would feed Mastodon, and a stronger Mastodon means a stronger Fediverse and this power would put Matrix, Friendica etc. in a better position. With federation however they can EEE one while killing another, and still advertise the whole thing as "I don't understand, why you say that we have a monopoly over online communication? We're even part of a federation? Meta plays nice with competitors. I'm so confused~".
"Some data format" is still a pretty vague handwave, IMO. What would they implement that other Fediverse users would need to care about? Some kind of proprietary image or video format? I don't see how that would gain traction.
Fediverse users can already link to FB/IG/WhatsApp content. Are you suggesting embedding it somehow? I'm not sure how that could be done in a proprietary manner that other implementations couldn't copy.
"We now allow big arse videos" is definitely not a feature that couldn't be reverse engineered. Instances can already do their own hosting, or not, depending on the resources the host wants to dedicate.
I'm sure that Meta would just love to be able to push a button that made all their competitors die. Everyone wants that button. Look around threads like this and count how many users would love to push that button themselves and wipe Meta out with it. But I'm just not seeing how Meta is going to do that by federating. As long as everyone keeps on their toes about how their resources are being used and what extensions they're adding to ActivityPub - something that they should be doing regardless of whether Meta is involved - the Fediverse seems pretty solid against attack to me.
Note: I did read your comment fully, but I'm going to address specific points, otherwise the discussion gets too long. (Sorry!)
“Some data format” is still a pretty vague handwave [...]
It is vague because there are multiple ways for Threads to screw with the Fediverse through data formats. But if you want a more specific example:
Let's say that Meta creates a new image format called TREDZ. It fills the same purpose as JPG, but it's closed source. The Threads app has native support for TREDZ images, but your browser doesn't render it.
If you access a Mastodon instance through Threads, everything works well, since the Threads app has support for other image formats. However, since your browser and current Mastodon apps have no support for TREDZ, pics in this format fail to render. You get broken content as a result, and probably some Threads crowds screeching at you because you ignored their picture, saying "u uze mastadon? lmaaao its broken it doesnt even pictures lol", encouraging you to ditch your instance to join Threads instead.
And you might say "reverse engineer TREDZ, problem solved". However:
- reverse engineering is costly and time-consuming
- Meta has professional coders in a paycheck, Mastodon relies mostly on volunteers
- Meta could easily encumber TREDZ with all sorts of nasty legal shit, like parents, and aggressively defend them.
As such, on a practical level, it would be not feasible to reverse-engineer TREDZ. And even if it was, the time necessary to do so is time that Threads is still causing damage to Mastodon.
Of course, this is just an example that I made up on the spot. Meta can think on more efficient ways to do so.
I’m sure that Meta would just love to be able to push a button that made all their competitors die. [...]
Yup. As you said, everyone wants that button. But due to the difference in power, Meta is closer to get that button than Mastodon is.
the Fediverse seems pretty solid against attack to me.
The protocol might be solid, but the community isn't. Communities stronger than the Fediverse died; and the Fediverse has the mixed blessing of decentralisation - the death of a part doesn't drag the other parts to the grave, but the survival of the other parts doesn't help much the dying one either.
Actually, I'd say "let them use TREDZ and destroy themselves if they want, problem solved." In this day and age nobody wants a proprietary image format, and if Threads won't display in a browser they've just blown one of their legs off.
This is a general problem with trying to make Threads depend on proprietary formats, they can't do that and still have it work in an ordinary web browser.
Most people don't even know what's a proprietary image format. From their PoV it would be "shitty broken Mastodon doesn't show images properly". And they would still pressure Mastodon users to switch.
if Threads won’t display in a browser they’ve just blown one of their legs off.
I'm not sure but I think that a similar strategy could work for browsers, using a web plugin.
But even if Meta decided that Threads is unavailable from browsers, it wouldn't be blowing one of Threads' legs off. There are far more mobile than desktop users nowadays; and if they want to EEE the Fediverse, they need numbers for that.
Here's five examples that they'be already done:
- Signing up with an Instagram account
- Automatically following everybody you follow on Instagram
- The ability to follow a thread on Threads
- Seeing content from anybody on Threads in your app
- Communicating with people on Threads who haven't opted in to federation
(Edited for formatting)
Fair! Good and bad depends on your perspective and how successful Meta is. It's only the last bit about "using selfishly for Meta's own ends" that I see as inherently bad. In general though I've writen elsewhere that I think it's a great opportunity for the fediverse -- I talked about about why in In Chaos There Is Opportunity and probably will say more in a later post in this series.
I'd say that the vast majority of economic actors - both companies like Meta and individual people - are generally acting in a selfish manner. It's one of the great successes of modern market economies that most of the time that selfishness can be harnessed to serve the public good in various ways, so I'd want to see more detail about what exactly they're doing before calling it bad.
I've certainly never said I trust Meta, just that I don't think they're the maniacal evil overlords many of these discussions are portraying them as.
OK, so, if you don't trust Meta, and think they're generally acting in a selfish manner, why do you think that they'll freely let people move from Threads to the fedierse and make it easy to take all their followers?
Or phrased somewhat differently: it's clearly good from their perspective to say that people can move their followers. Do you think it's also always better for them to also let people easily move all their followers (which Meta is able to monetize while on Threads) to some other instance (where it's harder for Meta to monetize them)? If there are situations where it's not better from Meta's perspective, why do you think they'll make it easy -- or even allow it?
I don't expect anything in particular from them. My position all throughout all of this is that we simply shouldn't be committing to defederate from Threads preemptively before they've even had a chance to show what they're going to actually do.
There are plenty of situations where companies "open up" in ways that may not seem to be immediately in their self-interest but that actually work out to their benefit when you consider larger strategic goals or even just the good will it gets them. Meta just so happens to be very active in developing and releasing important open-source projects, for example their release of the LLaMA AI models basically sparked the same flourishing of open source large language model development that StabilityAI's release of Stable Diffusion did for the art generators. Maybe you can come up with ulterior motives for all that, but the end result was still a positive one for the open source community. The same could happen with Threads and the Fediverse.
Sure, Meta -- and Google, and Microsoft -- is good about funding open-source projects when it suits their interest. Given where they are relative to Open AI and Google, releasing LLaMA as open source made a lot of sense for them. If they decide to seriously invest in fediverse compatibiilty they might well do something like release an open source client toolkit that would provide full functionality on Threads, whatever subset of Threads functionality Mastodon and maybe a couple of other platforms suppport, and has adaptors so that the community can support other platforms. Right now there isn't a good solution (nobody uses the AP C2S standard, Mastodon's API is the defacto standard but there are compatibility problems and quirks) so it benefits the community. And, it would have support for Threads functionality that other platforms don't support, so it benefits Meta more than everybody else.
But we were specifically talking about why they'd make it easy for people to move away from Threads to other platforms. Do you think that's in their business interest?