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?
Politics aside (I’m strongly against federating with corps for reasons already expressed here), can the instance even support federation with a multimillion user federation? Just look at the fedilags recently.
Meta can and will pay for it. They have enough funds to run their own instance.
“The instance” from the question isn’t Meta’s, it’s sh.itjust.works, or any other “small” instance. Federation mostly works by mirroring a lot of data from instance A (i.e. Meta) into instance B (i.e. sh.itjust.works). If instance A broadcasts a lot of data, instance B might get overloaded.
Activitypub runs on a pull model. Completely depends what people subscribe to.
Also, as this’ll essentially be Meta’s version of Mastodon, I assume it’ll work similarly: Threads users will have to follow the community “user” to participate, and then can make posts and comments. This is more a Mastodon issue than a threadiverse issue imho.