Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you’re a server admin, please defederate Meta’s domain “threads.net”
If you don’t run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate “threads.net”.
I can kinda see the point, but also without providing actual reasons, this post just seems like a LARP.
I got a reason! It’s because people are afraid meta is doing what Microsoft did to a much earlier project. The crux of that whole story is that Microsoft adopted the new tech, became the biggest player thus dominating the area, then, when they had full control of the tech they ended up shutting it down. Some people are convinced meta is going to do that to the fediverse.
This is vague and handwavy, I’m hoping someone actually knows the name of the project. It was early 90s I believe or maybe into the early 00s but it was before my time in the tech sphere of the internet.
I don’t understand how they would control it
They have their branding which will push people to use their platform. More people using their platform = more content coming from threads. Once they have enough posts from threads that people from other instances are used to seeing mostly threads content they’ll defederate. People will miss the volume of posts and then move to threads.
Where will those users come from? Not from the Fediverse. There aren’t enough Fediverse users to sustain even one month of Threads growth. They do not care about the Fediverse at all.
Threads has lots of users because they just signed everyone up who has an Instagram account. They aren’t trying to steal Fediverse users or “extinguish” the technology, they’re trying to be a Twitter alternative.
Also, people here don’t need extra content from Threads. We already have content. You can just personally block Threads if you don’t like it. It’s your choice.
“They do not care about the Fediverse at all.”
And yet here we are with Meta trying to join the fediverse.
Pretty fucking odd behaviour for an entity that “do not care at all”, no?
They do not care for growth or anything else. They’re just implementing ActivityPub to look like “the good guys” compared to Musk, and also probably to try and look nice in front of the European Union. “See? We’re implementing open protocols, we’re not a gatekeeper anymore!”
Corporate servers with corp funding and corp advertising using existing instagram and facebook support to onboard more users and generate content to the point where they drown out non-thread content to a point where, theoretically, non-thread servers become silent for content and more read-only.
Then, they pull the plug, and the fledgeling communities we had here have withered and have to restart all over again.
Who knows if thats the actual goal, but thats the idea.
That’s exactly their goal
makes sense. and the alternative is that the fediverse rips itself apart before then by de-federating with itself
You might not understand how they are going to control it, but they do. Facebook doesn’t do anything without a plan on how to either get a ton of money from something or a plan on how to destroy that thing. So the fact that they are trying to integrate into the fediverse means they have a plan. They are smarter and more evil than anyone here in the area of making money and destroying competitors, and they will 100% do one of those things, probably both.
just by being the biggest player in the system so all the activity is on their server, then they shut it down and leave the rest of the drivers with a big hole in the community.
So… we would be back to exactly how we are now?
You’re talking about XMPP, and it was google with google chat that people refer to with it.
That said, there’s a lot of details that story people throw around about google killing it that lacks some details. Specifically that the premier service that used and developed the standard, jabber, was acquired by cisco like 8 years before google supposedly killed it, which i would argue affected it far harder than google chat did.
It’s also lacking a lot of modern features that were becoming staple around the time that it was killed; i.e. QoS, assured delivery, read receipts, and a few other things. I still don’t think the protocol supports them.
Also, the protocol still exists and is used. It’s used by microsoft in skype for business, it’s also the IM protocol for lots of gaming platforms like origin, playstation, the switch (for its push notifications for their online service), League of legends, fortnite, and others. It’s still a reasonably popular standard when it comes to chat programs, though none of them that i’m aware of use the actual federation piece of it to talk to each other.
While the tactic alluded to does exist (“embrace, extend, extinguish”), i’ve never been necessarily convinced that google “kiled” xmpp, as its been around a long time and continues to be for various reasons. Even with google chat, it was never a ‘front end’ thing many users even thought about, because it’s back end frameworks tech, and it continues to be so in lots of different places today. I’m reasonably sure that the people who get upset about it and proclaim google killed it are basically just upset that it didn’t become the defacto chat standard today, which i would argue almost nothing is the defacto standard anyways, unless you count discord which kinda came out of nowhere like a whirlwind and took over the chat space and has nothing to do with any XMPP drama.
Ultimately, its up to you (whoever is reading this) to look into the facts of the matter and decide for yourself if that’s what really happened, but keep in mind, the people who usually repeat the anecdote about how google killed it have an agenda to push. I’m personally skeptical, because there’s reasons for google to have dropped it (see mentioned limitations above), and even back then, it wasn’t that outrageously popular. In fact, i would argue its more widely used today than it was back then, but i have no hard numbers on that.