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Threads Has Begun Federating Via ActivityPub
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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Technology
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I can follow him on kbin.
https://kbin.social/u/@mosseri@threads.net/posts
Interoperability was the purpose of activitypub. I'm not oppossed to Meta , Tumblr and wordpress joining the fediverse.
As long as I can use an open source community platform.
Let's hope this isn't the first step of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Although in reality it probably is.
It will end up being de facto EEE, the same way it's become functionally impossible to run your own email server. Sure you technically can, but the handful of big players block everything else and make it impossible to actually email anyone.
It'll be like that on the fediverse. Big companies like this will dominate the space, refuse to federate with most others except the big players, and people will realize that unless you only want a mastodon instance with like 20 people on it, it won't be worth the trouble.
That's not even true, I run my own mailserver for private and a business and it works like expected.
Absolutely, Outlook.com is by far the worst in this regard. I stopped running my own mail server a few years ago because it was just unbearable.
Are you using a residential IP? There are lists of residential IP ranges for mail servers to block, no matter how well configured.
Hm, I thought hosting providers should be fine unless you just happened to get an IP in a block that some spammers also used to use... but then again, I stopped self-hosting email several years ago because of all the hoops one has to constantly jump through (for reference, it used to work fine from Online.net's —now Scaleway— bare metal servers, like 5 years ago).
So what do you suggest, out of curiosity? I have the same assessment, it just seems like the only way it could work, long-term and for all users.
I think the cat's out of the bag. There's no stopping it at this point. And even if ever person who runs a Mastodon server got together to push back, defederated with Threads and BlueSky, and tried to stay away, it wouldn't even be a blip on the radar for these big players.
To be honest, I'm not sold on federation in general for social media. I think it's an answer to the wrong question. We're asking "how can we make social media better?" and not "why do we need social media at all?"
Federation has shown itself to be extremely problematic. You have people coming and going from other instances that you don't control and can't enforce in any way other than to just block the instance. If I have e.g. a Mastodon instance based around a safe, positive space for the queer community, and others have instances based around bigotry, white supremacy, transphobia, etc. (which they do), then I either allow bigots to come and go, or I have to spend an inordinate amount of extra time on moderation. Same goes for Lemmy/kbin/etc.
People are also continuing to think with a limited frame of reference. The idea of federation is still "how can I get all my 'content' in one place?" because we've been dominated by these monolithic walled gardens for the last decade. Sure it might be annoying to have to have multiple logins for difference services, but I'd rather that over having a single place where Nazis can come and go as they please with few to no tools to stop them.
Hmm. I don't know if weak moderation tools are intrinsic to federation. You can certainly ban users from other instances, and if that doesn't already hide their comments on other instances, it could.
People have talked about going back to disconnected forums recently, notably Kurzgesagt, but it is annoying, to the point where it can kill some spaces which are too niche or frivolous to survive alone. I don't think r/WTFaucet on Reddit could be a standalone forum, for example. I guess if it saves our civilisation like they were saying the I could make that sacrifice.
Most of those communities preemptively blocked threads months ago.
What communities are you talking about specifically? I tried but I haven’t yet found a list of those that defederated preemptively. I can’t imagine it’s the majority of instances/users.
100% agree, I think most reactions here are blown way out of proportion even though I can relate to the general "fuck meta" attitude.
Of course cooperate social media isn’t the only harmful social media, if anything it might be the most civil one for its scale, simply because they’re trying to sell ads next to the content so the content can’t be complete garbage. They also have a bunch of other incentives that ultimately make it a shit experience for everyone, but there is an incentive to moderate.
Something to remember is that it isn’t the company producing the harmful content. It’s people.
Yes it is, but people are sheep. Wolf's come to get dinner.
Lol, as if Facebook cares about the Fediverse. With its 141 million users, Threads is already ten times bigger than the Fediverse ever was.
ActivityPub isn't a threat to their business, Bluesky is.
They do. Their business model is to take out upstarts with growing popularity trends. By the time they actually get big, it's too late.
With several organisations making the move to the fediverse, it is something they want to deal with.
Look at the fediverse’s monthly active users, it’s declining. There’s a pretty solid wall of friction when trying to participate and the vast majority of people won’t ever be a part of it in its current state. There’s no upward tend here and I doubt that it’s ever going to be a real danger for meta.
Isn't Bluesky much smaller than Mastodon?
At the moment, because it's almost impossible to get in without knowing someone who's already in. Currently, after about 10 months, Bluesky has about 2 million users (a sixth of the Fediverse). However, those 12 million Fediverse users have accumulated over seven years. Based on the statistics of fediverse.observer, the majority of those accounts seem to be inactive as well. Mastodon shows growth (about 100k per month) but other parts of the Fediverse are shrinking in activity.
Wikipedia has a graph of Bluesky's user base growth:
At its current pace, it'll take over a year and a half for BS to overtake the Fediverse (in total accounts, four or five months when looking at active users), but I expect those numbers jump up when the platform leaves beta. Wait list + current user base on Bluesky already exceeds the reported "active user" count on Fediverse Observer.
My personal anecdata: all the (semi) corporate entities I used to follow are over at Bluesky right now. Some, annoyingly, use it as their primary platform, while others cross post the same way people did when Mastodon gained mainstream attention. A few of the people/organisations I used to follow on Twitter are on Mastodon (almost exclusively people in the tech sector and a government service here or there) but I haven't seen any growth whatsoever. Various experiments with Mastodon and other fediverse media also seem to have ended, with people leaving the Fediverse for various reasons (Alec from Technology Connections has done nice write-ups of why the Fediverse kind of sucks if you're "internet famous" right now, and the reactions from Fediverse evangelists below show why that's going to stay that way for a while).
I want Bluesky to either commit to federation, or for the Fediverse to take over, but neither seem to stand much of a chance against any corporation with VC money right now. Most of the internet doesn't seem to be interested in federation and even here on Lemmy many people are confused by it (i.e. "I want to send this person a message but when I go to their profile it says I'm not logged in" because they went to the other user's home instance instead of their own, an easy mistake to make).
I think Bluesky is even smaller. It probably could’ve been a Twitter competitor before threads came around.
EEE doesn't work with FOSS, where anyone can fork a project and go with it.
Ask Oracle how well EEE worked for them with Sun, Java, or MySQL. Ask Microsoft how well adding the WSL worked to kill Linux.
Threads can try as much as they want, the fediverse is already full of different projects like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Calckey, etc. and they aren't extinguishing each other.
The point of EEE isn't outright destruction but marketplace irrelevance. FOSS projects can absolutely be hit by it.
Java actually was hit by EEE tactics from Microsoft, and they were actually rather successful. Sun has to sue MS to stop them from calling their Java VMs Java.
HTML was hit by EEE tactics so well that for years IE was the only game in town and other browsers couldn't compete.
Sun sued MS to stop them from calling it "Java™", then Oracle failed spectacularly to EEE it when they lost the API lawsuit against Google.
MSIE's popularity arose from monopolistic practices by Microsoft, not its EEE tactics against HTML, which failed miserably.
I would know it, I was there: everyone started making websites in Flash because it was the multiplatform solution, even if it had more security holes than a female duck cornered by a flock of horny drakes, only MS sellouts used MSIE's proprietary extensions to HTML, only Oracle sellouts used post-Sun Java... and it all went down the drain the moment JavaScript evolved to a point of allowing polyfills to make a single codebase compatible with all browsers.
Now all browsers are FOSS-based, with de-branded forked versions making the rounds, and it's good.
Because that was part of MS's EEE strategy.
Ooo boy you do not remember your history.
When Microsoft started pushing IE, they did everything in their power to sabotage the competition. That included the creation of a proprietary web extension called ActiveX. Back in the day, this, along with non-standard behaviour when dealing with the actual standards, was the reason why many, many sites would not work in non-IE browsers. Developers only cared about what worked in IE, not what was standard. That didn't change until the arrival of Firefox.
You know how trademarks work? Sue or lose it.
I remember my history quite well, all the way back to Mosaic and before. I also remember "Best viewed with Netscape" websites (1994), when everyone and his uncle had a proprietary plugin they were trying to push, and only a handful of developers (I was one of them) actually cared about any standards. Firefox (2004) came very late to the party, way after the "MSIE can't be uninstalled from Windows" shenanigans (1997).
Wouldn't have applied in this case. Microsoft actually did have permission from Sun to use the trademark...right up until they made their Java VM incompatible with base Java, and Sun sued to terminate the agreement.
Okay? And? None of them had any actual leverage to force people into using their standards. Microsoft had a de facto monopoly on an essential bit of computing software that they leveraged to hell and back to make their proprietary standards THE de facto standard.
And at that point, IE had a 97% market share. Care to take a wild stab in the dark why?