What Meta’s Fediverse Plans Mean for Threads Users
What Meta’s Fediverse Plans Mean for Threads Users
We spoke with a product manager at Meta to learn how the company plans to bring interoperability to Threads in the coming months. It faces both technical and cultural challenges.
Meta is treading carefully, doing a phased implementation while continuing conversations with Fediverse leaders. This will give the company more time to iron out some of the integration kinks. “Do we adapt the protocol to be able to support this?” Lambert asks. “Or do we try to do some kind of interesting, unique implementation?” For example, Threads supports audio posts, a feature not currently supported within ActivityPub, so Meta is experimenting with “federating” a text transcription of the original post instead of the audio version.
It was never a good idea federating with Threads
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For as long as this article is, it is remarkably free of journalism. It is basically a press release from Meta saying that they're planning to implement Threads in a few months, and don't feel like saying more about it than that.
“Do we adapt the protocol to be able to support this?” Lambert asks. “Or do we try to do some kind of interesting, unique implementation?”
This is a fascinating question, both in its lack of an answer, and in the inherent framing of the question that of course they're going to introduce incompatibilities, and the discussion is simply about how to do it.
Mastodon allows some artistic nudity
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Additionally, specifics are still murky regarding exactly how user data will be handled after the connections between networks are established. For example, if you federate a post from Threads and decide to delete it afterwards, what happens to the cached post on the servers of the other networks?
That... is not the central question that's on people minds about how user data will be handled. Presumably you were in a position to ask Rachel Lambert, the product manager at Meta who started the company's journey towards interoperability, a more obvious and salient question, and include in your article her response.
Meta is treading carefully, doing a phased implementation while continuing conversations with Fediverse leaders.
Who are these leaders and what are they saying about this? This, also, seems like it would have been pertinent information to include. If Meta's answer was "You're not allowed to know that at present," then including that response seems like it would have made the article quite a bit more informative than simply pretending it didn't occur to you to ask for any details about this.
Mastodon allows some artistic nudity
This is akin to saying "the Internet allows some artistic nudity". Like, what do they think Mastodon is? Who is allowing it? "Mastodon" also allows hardcore porn. Or it doesn't. Or moderation is spotty. Or it's collapsed behind a warning.
Journalists, do like the barest minimum of research before simply relaying statements from company spokespeople.
Yeah, the whole article is like that. Not only is the writer apparently clueless enough to get basic facts about Mastodon wrong, but each one is wrong with a flavor of a Facebook-favoring way (like implying in several different subtle ways that Mastodon includes some sort of harmful behavior or some limitation, and we need to carefully monitor to make sure it doesn't negatively impact any Facebook users, and that's the issue). And, there's absolutely no curiosity or follow-up question even after statements that are clearly inviting them.
Funny thing is that the mainstream threads audience would probably do more harm to the mastodon ecosystem by orders of magnitude.
There is a big cultural disconnect. I’m active in both and they are very different communities by and large.
This is an odd take and not even close. It is in fact the Fediverse that would be more harmful. Meta has laws and government scrutiny. There’s a lot of willing filth on the Fediverse. Blocking instances more so became a think the last 1-2 years. Blocking those instances does not mean they don’t exist. Can you find harmful content on Meta’s platform? Sure but that’s mostly due to volume. Where as there’s Fediverse instances straight up for illegal and gross content
Wired used to have actual journalists. How far they have fallen...
Absolutely spot on teardown of this joke article.