I’m surprised they’re still interested in ActivityPub.
Hot Take: This is good because its easier for people to leave threads, since they can still contact their friends on threads. I do think having most instances block them is also good, so people can have a choice (I personally don’t want threads).
I’m not surprised, but I agree with the hot take, so maybe it’s only warm.
I think they keep interest in ActivityPub in order to keep regulators concerned with Antitrust at bay. The Fediverse isn’t a real threat in Meta’s view and keeping an engineer or two on it in order to stay invested is worth the cost.
Threads can say they are making an honest effort to work with the larger open source community and open federated internet. As an added bonus, it isn’t actually a lie. Now the effort they’re putting in is the absolute minimum, but it’s there.
Now I still do think this is a positive. While most people on Threads will probably never leave, it does introduce them to the wider Fediverse. It makes the Fediverse a less scary thing.
The fediverse feed isn’t algorithmically ranked, or subject to any of Threads’ rules or moderation; it’s just a reverse-chronological feed of stuff you follow.
'Member when Facebook was like that? You know, the way people want it?
Guess all those blocks had a reason after all.
Ewww
Still not fully integrated, but it’s nice to see broader ActiviyPub adoption beyond “follow a handful of users who opted-in”. I never expected Meta to be the company inching towards federation and not bluesky. Makes me wonder if Tumblr will ever follow through with their promises to federate.
edit: To the (sadly predictable) response that “Meta will screw you over in a heartbeat” YES, of COURSE they will, that’s why it’s GOOD to be able to access Threads content safely and privately from a non-Meta controlled platform.
Nahhh, Meta sucks ass and will screw you over in a heartbeat. What’s in it for them is the question.
Data. User data. Always has been.
FB right now is probably 90% bots and AI. The Fediverse isn’t—for the moment being. I’m sure they found a way to tap into it by keeping a door open while pretending to help aerate the room.
They also want to control the headlines that make it to the front page like other major instances do.
Oh yes you’re right—forgot about that
But what data would federating give them that they couldn’t just get on the public internet right now? They could already scrape all of this from mastodon already if data was all that they’re after.
It’s not just data they’re after.
They also learn how their users interact with it.
Tumblr is being reworked to have a Wordpress backend right now, and Wordpress already has well working ActivityPub support, so yes, Tumblr will very likely happen once they made the switch.
I suspect the technical debt in Tumblr was larger than expected when the first announce federation support, and now it became nearly a full rewrite, which takes time.
Tumblr also downsized to 25 employees (including T&S). I don’t expect anything groudbreaking from them soon.
Got it, very interesting! I look forward to it being worked out soon, Wordpress federation is awesome.
Shit.
Honestly, I thought Meta talking about Fediverse integration was just marketing bullshit. Are they really doing it? 🤔
EEE, sorry.
The most they can do is add a load of more users to the fediverse then take them away again. For them to successfully EEE the fediverse, it would require convincing existing fediverse users to switch to threads. I cannot see that happening on here on any noticeable scale.
If anything, Bluesky is the bigger threat as it touts itself as “decentralised” in order to gain users who would have otherwise gone to Mastodon, then easily pull the plug.
“EEE” doesn’t really make sense in this context, and even if there was some way for Meta to affect non Meta-owned instances- ActivityPub is an open protocol and Meta is allowed to use it however they want.
The most they can do is add a load of more users to the fediverse then take them away again. For them to successfully EEE the fediverse, it would require convincing existing fediverse users to switch to threads. I cannot see that happening on here on any noticeable scale.
Na, they were quite explicit what their plan is: they realized that there are interesting “content creators” on the fediverse, and that many other “content creators” are eying the fediverse and similar platforms as a way to have more control over the platform they use. And ultimately users will follow the creators, once the creators are sufficiently fed up with being taken hostage by facebook etc. So they are willing to let the creators switch to the fediverse, but want to retain the users as ultimatly that is where their revenue is coming from via advertisement and data harvesting.
Not sure that’s right.
Mind you, I fully agree with you on Bluesky, but I think Threads really isn’t much different.
For example, say this integration is fully accomplished. Fediverse users wouldn’t have a real reason to switch to Threads, but because Threads is a much larger platform all future users are gonna go there, and not to the rest of the Fediverse. That, already, I think is an issue. Then, because it’s a bigger platform, most communities are gonna start to be populated mostly by Threads users - simply because numbers rule. The 2nd E comes into play: extend. The protocols are extended. At first, it might not be enough to switch - just some quality of life changes, maybe - but the more stuff is added, the more the experience for the Threads users - aka, the majority of the users on any given community on the Fediverse - starts to diverge from the rest of the users. Now, at this point, a Fediverse user has two choices: either ignore this, or switch. Sure, many will just ignore it - the people on the Fediverse right now are the kind of people that would tend to ignore that, anyway - but plenty won’t, because it’s SOCIAL media. SOCIAL! If your experience differs significantly from your peers, that will bother you, and you will want to change, especially if you’re in the crushing minority.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Hey, maybe I’m wrong! Hopefully, even. However, I do see it happening. Hope I got my point across.
How come these accusations aren’t thrown at piefed? Like it’s almost the exact same thing as lemmy just with more features like multi-community feeds, which could entice users over to piefed and leave current lemmy behind.
Or is EEE only EEE if it’s a corporation doing it?
Edit: I’m legit asking, I objectively don’t understand the difference between the two unless we’re taking motive into account? But that’s hard to prove motive either way.
It’s only EEE if it’s an entity that could be reasonable expected to do it.
Sure, Piefed could adopt ActivityPub, extend it with proprietary capabilities, and then use that to strongly disadvantage its competitors. However, Piefed is a fully open-source project without ads or any money-making aspect at all, started by some random dude from New Zealand. Not exactly prime EEE grounds, you know?
Basically, yes. EEE is a strategy developed by a dominant company whose revenue stream came from paid proprietary software and services but which embraced open standards with the goal of vanquishing the threat to their business model posed by that openness and maintaining/recovering their proprietary domination.
Does ActivityPub being open and used by many different projects & organizations pose a threat to Piefed’s business model? Is Piefed a powerful company that built that power on a proprietary model and seeks to preserve that power by embracing, extending, and extinguishing ActivityPub? With the goal of maintaining/recovering proprietary domination?
No. So it ain’t EEE.
Yes, EEE is the software version of abusing your market dominance which may have been obtained via innovation (i.e. when Apple launched the iPhone) or enhancement of an already existing good or service (i. e. Lemmy).
They’ve been doing it for quite a while. Very slowly. The problem is it’s currently unidirectional, and opt-in. I imagine its the same reason Apple has adopted RCS (also opt-in): legal pressure.
If they just ignore it completely, legislators might completely fuck them like they did Apple with alternative payments. But if they kinda half-ass it then they can point to it and say “SEE, WE HAVE INTEROP! NO MONOPOLY!”
Its a bit charitable to call threads a monopoly since no one uses it.
- Bit charitable to say “no one uses it” when they have >300M MAU
- Wasn’t talking about Threads, I was talking about Meta.
I honestly doubt that, It has no relevance – at all. I see screenshots of bluesky posts everywhere, but rarely see threads posts.
You’re giving me anecdotes and I’m giving you statistics.
Should I feel grubby?
so?
Honestly
