The Mastodon developers have posted their thoughts on Threads.
They seem quite welcoming about the whole thing, as they have been advocating greater adoption of federation by the big social media firms. However, they mention XMPP and we've been burnt by them before - once bitten twice shy?
Interesting stance. I hope they are right. Maybe it is a win for open protocols. I just feel like federating with Facebook is like getting into bed with your drunk uncle who has a history of molesting people.
Worth noting that it is also a pretty controversial stance in some quarters? I appreciate the utopian/optimistic stance and, if you feel all social media should federate and give their users the option to move, then this development should be welcomed.
However, Meta is an all-consuming amoeba and you play nice with them at your peril.
As they say they'll allow account migration, I am kinda hoping that we can poach some of their users when they realise that being on the Fediverse means you don't have to give your content to a soulless corporation for free. However, I might be being optimistic.
At the moment, they seem to have tossed out a beta version to try and capitalise on Twitter's problems but it's up in the air if it'll even work - the discussion on the radio suggested people use Twitter to follow news and current affairs and Instagram for funny dog videos and now you are going to be getting your news and current affairs from the people who make funny dog videos. Possibly a bit flippant but it's right in that Twitter has a lot of staying power because people will have carefully curated their account to deliver the information they value. That in itself makes it difficult to move.
I'm struggling to see the benefits of defederation. If we defederate from too many places, then users will make accounts to see what's on new platforms. If there is a better experience on the other side, then they will abandon these instances. If you can see content from the new platforms already then that is less of a reason to abandon ship.
I'm not buying the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish argument. It's more likely that we end up making ourselves irrelevant, than Meta somehow makes an open source protocol closed.
Philosophically, wasnt the idea behind an open protocol so that access remains open and is free from broad bans like this? Trying to keep people out en masse is not much different from having a Reddit-style walled garden to keep them in.
If we end up defederating from everything new and scary then why did we even leave Reddit?
I'm against it.
First, I fear it's an attempt to embrace, extend, extinguish the fediverse, but I dont know what blocking Threads is going to do to stop that...
Second, I want Meta to have as little data on me as possible, so if they are storing my comments and profile data, I'm not happy. Call me crazy, but I worry what big data algorithms they have behind the scenes can do to tie things together.
Third, I'm huge advocate for digital privacy, and against these large social media companies. What demand in exchange for what they provide is massively unbalanced in my opinion. I dont want to support them by giving them content I havent actually agreed to give them!
Honestly, I see no upside to them federating, other than content that I'm not desperate for.
embrace, extend, extinguish
Ayyy this again. A catchy sound bite goes a long way on the internet I suppose? Never mind that the examples are a good twenty years old and the recent MS Linux one isn't even correct. But that's cool. It sounds edgy I suppose.
I'm not arguing for Meta (they can go fuck themselves) but give people the choice and they will choose wisely for themselves. Block Meta if you want, or don't if you don't want.
I don't think that having a realistic concern that Meta may be using a well documented business tactic that is used to snuff out competitors, to snuff out a competitor.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is associated with MS, but they're not the only company to use.
I think many will see Meta entering the fediverse space as a threat to something nice that's separate from corporate greed.
The problem with using that term is that people often have zero evidence of it and zero evidence ever materialises. Just because it might have been a business practice in the past doesn't mean that it is now. You don't go around saying oh you're Belgian and they did shitty stuff in the past so you must be a rabid colonialist. The two just don't follow.
I think many will see Meta entering the fediverse space as a threat to something nice that's separate from corporate greed.
Many will. Many will not. Surely the beauty of federation is that you can choose? If it's not possible now I would love to see a user option to block specific instances. Then users can block Meta if they wish and live happily in the gardens of their own making. Or if they don't then they can still see federated content from Meta users.
Out of interest, does blocking go both ways? If I block Meta, I can't see their content, but can they still see mine?
If they can, blocking does nothing to prevent them harvesting data on me does it?
As I understand it they can't see anything from communities that don't federate with them, but they can see your activity on communities that do. So if you don't want them to have any data on you, you'd have to be careful to only interact with content on instances that block federation with Meta.
That said they could scrape content from instances that don't federate with them but I think that would be legally sketchy since holding that data could violate GDPR and reposting it could be considered copyright infringement.
I'm not sure there's much of a legal framework for feddiverse content since it's relatively small and non-profit AFAIK. I think it would make sense for instances to have clear terms of use. They could state that you licence them to serve up your content and send it to federated instances, but not allow them to monetise it beyond raising reasonable hosting and development fees.
Thanks for the explanation, that's really helpful.
Most of the conversations Ive seen around this are about giving the user more tools to curate their experience by being able to block at an instance level. But as you say, that doesn't stop predatory instances scraping your data anyway, neither does defederating really.
The fact seems to be that if Meta (or chat GPT for that matter) want your data, you can't really stop them. However, your point about the whole licensing angle is really interesting, I wonder if there's a solution somewhere involving licensing your own content?
Feels kind of weird to think about but what would happen if your account had its own unique creative commons license? I guess the issue would be proving your data was stolen, but if literally everyone on the fediverse did it, any indication of fediverse related data being used by someone like meta could incur some kind of legal action?
Dunno, I don't know anything about how licensing works.
Dunno, I don't know anything about how licensing works.
Yeah, same.
This is the way Wikipedia works though. Everything contributed there is automatically CC-BY-SA and GFDL (bar some older stuff). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights
I think an instance could have that as part of its sign-up and community rules; that the content submitted is CC-NC licensed. Anyone using that data for a commercial purpose would be infringing our copyright since they are not complying with the license terms.
That's a good question. I don't know yet.
I appreciate what you're trying to say, that we shouldn't jump to negative conclusions and maybe give it a chance, but if you need some explicit proof that this happens, that Meta probably dont have ours, or the fediverses, best interests at heart, then we're going to be waiting a long time.
Surely the beauty of federation is that you can choose?
Yes, and currently we only have the choice together as an instance. I'm using my voice to raise my concerns. Hopefully a concesus is reached.
Then users can block Meta if they wish and live happily in the gardens of their own making.
If that happens, great! Will Meta respect that I'm blocking them and not consume my data and content? Do they have any reason to? Any obligation, any law that says they have to? Probably not... so my choice will be let Meta take data against my consent or leave the fediverse.
Say no to Meta! They inevitably will want to Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish!
I don't believe they will stick with the ActivityPub outside of their initial start up period for Threads. While they are federating though it will be a fantastic opportunity to introduce users to Lemmy from Threads. If the Lemmy integration in Threads is anything like Mastodon's then I think it's more then worthwhile given that Lemmy is offering something Threads isn't currently covering.
However I think the onus should be on Meta to Federate respectfully, if they aren't willing to federate without contracts getting involved then I think that's completely against the spirt of the Fediverse and Meta shouldn't be allowed to operate in that capacity.
My fear is that they're going to go at it Chrome/IE style: Get big enough that their interpretation of the standards becomes the standard.
I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Read up on the XMPP experience with Google. Think the warning is don't link up with the cooperate big boys if you want your alternative to them to survive
Community for the Feddit UK instance.
A place to log issues, and for the admins to communicate with everyone.