Meta/Instagram launched a new product called Threads today (working title project92). It adds a new interface for creating text posts and replying to them, using your Instagram account. Of note, Meta has stated that Threads plans to support ActivityPub in the future, and allow federation with ActivityPub services. If you actually look at your Threads profile page in the app your username has a threads.net tag next to it - presumably to support future federation.
Per the link, a number of fediverse communities are pledging to block any Meta-directed instances that should exist in the future. Thus instance content would not be federated to Meta instances, and Meta users would not be able to interact with instance content.
I'm curious what the opinions on this here are. I personally feel like Meta has shown time and time again that they are not very good citizens of the Internet; beyond concerns of an Eternal September triggered by federated Instagram, I worry that bringing their massive userbase to the fediverse would allow them to influence it to negative effect.
I also understand how that could be seen to go against the point of federated social media in the first place, and I'm eager to hear more opinions. What do you think?
I don't see why they would bother with the fediverse as it exists to be honest. To me it seems like a liability from their point of view. Not sure if they've spoken more about this but Facebook getting in more shit by having their users exposed to stuff that they don't explicitly control doesn't seem like something they'd want.
That being said, I feel like defederating with them if needed is a solid idea but their sheer size may make that decision difficult for instances that are looking to grow given that they've already amassed twice the accounts of the Lemmy fediverse in a few hours. Now not all growth is good growth like you've mentioned but there's no partial defederation so either you leech on some of their userbase or you don't.
I see some places going for growth if that's an option which may not necessarily be a bad choice (unless they impose strict rules to follow if you want to federate with them) given that facebook has the capital to bury us with if they choose to so our compliance probably won't have a very big impact on how things play out in the long run.
It's because companies like Meta want all the power they can get. As you said, there's no reason for them to join the fediverse, other than to control it or kill it off, that is.
I'm not against Threads existing, especially with the way Twitter is going. People need an alternative and I don't believe that Mastodon is the answer for many.
But Threads and the fediverse can absolutely exist separately, and is why I support defederation.
I know people will hate this but I think zuck is just a nerd with the money to do anything he likes but he's not really very social and not really into sports or anything so like many of us he spends his focus on tech stuff and science fiction.
He obviously kinda loves the idea of the metaverse, and yeah Facebook is riddled with problems but they've never really done any of the really immoral and anti competitive things bill gates Microsoft did so I think it's jumping the gun a bit to instantly jump to EEE - it's possible he just genuinely believes the future is going to be a federation of open source protocols and he simply wants to live in that future.
That said there's a lot of problems inherent in letting any big company gain any form of dominance over open social networks especially one as frequently socially problematic as meta