Meta's 'Threads' wants to colonize the Fediverse

Meta plans to work with ActivityPub, a vendor that already partners with Mastodon and is currently working on a deal with Tumblr. The agreement isn’t finalized yet, but has been referenced in press releases announcing Threads.

Lol. The author of this article is braindead and has no Idea what he's writing about. ActivityPub is an open standard not a vendor. There can't be an agreement because there's no one to agree with. All they will do is implement the standard

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It comes from Fortune, they can't conceive of something that's not a business.

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- This is brilliant in both it's brevity and accuracy; and could be borrowed to describe their coverage of bitcoin when it first started to bubble.
  
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Hello, I'd like two ActivityPubs please.

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He's persona non grata these days, but the old quote from Scott Adams applies here:

"I read a newspaper article about something I know very well—my own field—and it was so full of errors that I had to wonder how many errors there were in other articles on topics I didn’t know much about."

If they're getting an important detail like this so mindblowingly wrong, what else are they getting wrong?

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- I believe this is known as Knoll's law of media accuracy
  
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- Journalists are not educated in anything except how to write. And they go and write about everything, aiming for an audience that is dumber than them. On top of all that journalism is an industry in contraction. Even the good journalists are paid as badly as teachers and they work under great pressure. Many of them are addicted to watching their click stats and not much better than a meatspace Facebook algorithm on legs. Is it any mystery how the end result is crap?
  
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Vendor made me laugh too. :)

If you spend too much time in Microsoft-land or Enterprise-ville, you will start to see everything as vendors. But in the open source world it's different.

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Exactly. Vendor my arse, it's an open standard.

Does Fortune think Linux also partnered with RedHat, Ubuntu, Apple, Windows and everybody else who's every borrowed from/made use of/implemented an open standard??

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- Don't forget GNU
  
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It's Fortune. What do you expect? They all think in capitalism, and the very concept of OSS is alien in their mind.

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ActivityPub is the best pub ever 🍻

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I'm expecting FB to make some sort of proprietary fork of ActivityPub. I'm not quite sure what the point of Threads is, from Zuck's POV, excluding the desire to eat Musks's lunch, which is huge, so that's more than enough. The man needs a win, bad, after that Metaverse flop heard round the world.

But everything you'd consider an advantage to the Fediverse is a downside to his business model, and the things it enables, like user-controlled hosting, don't suit his ends. Maybe he intends to colonize this place, too, but up until very recently there wasn't a meaningful user base to gain control over. Still isn't. Mastodon got the biggest boost, they're up to 8 mil users now, a healthy number for sure, but Instagram is pushing a billion users, so the number isn't much to him.

So he's not going to actually like anything about the Fediverse, or what it offers, nor will he like its downsides much. ActivityPub, as it is, doesn't do him any favors. I can't imagine anything other than the skeleton of ActivityPub getting repurposed into something else that runs Threads in the locked down way that Meta is accustomed to. He just seems to be grabbing at anything that's loose for the taking.

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- I’m expecting FB to make some sort of proprietary fork of ActivityPub.
  
  ActivityPub is based on a W3C standard. I found this license here, but I'm not sure if there is any protections against re-privatization.
  
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This completely contrasts the idea of decentralizing the Fediverse.

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And it's so beautiful and ironical

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In other words, meta wants to metastasize.

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Developers would also be able to build their own features and set their own content moderation policies and standards for their respective servers. Meta bills this new capability as a way to protect people

So Meta is keenly aware of this and totally won't use it as a way to attract and funnel users onto their servers until one day they decide to take everyone and leave.

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Congratulations. You’ve literally described a slippery slope fallacy.

I’m on the hate train as much as everyone else when it comes to Meta and Threads but there is no way “everyone” is going to eventually end up in their servers and they just take it all away in one fell swoop.

Zuck is not some mastermind engineer. He is a rich dude with a lot of capital and a penchant for making more of it. He is an idiot and almost nuked his company over a pair of stupid VR goggles and a shitty half baked matrix idea.

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- ...
  
  Appeals to fallacies, but refuses to consider the most reasonable form of the argument and instead assumes 'everyone' doesn't mean 'enough people that the rest don't matter'.
  
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- When we've already seen this strategy play out in the form of Microsoft's great EEE, it's hard not to assume malevolent intentions when a mega-corporation suddenly starts getting buddy-buddy with the indies (who are creating an adjacent product) out of nowhere.
  
  You don't chop down a big tree on one go. You chop, chop, chop away over and over until eventually the trunk is too weak to support the rest of the tree.
  
  If they can pull enough users and developers away from the Fediverse and ActivityPub, then it'll kill off (or extinguish) the whole thing.
  
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- Zuck is not some mastermind engineer.
  
  Meta is not just Zuck. It is a rapacious corporation.
  
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The fediverse is like 2 to 3 million, Threads is about to hit 100 million. Instagram has billions. Something telling me that redesigning their entire infrastructure just to attempt to absorb that little amount of people who are known to be hostile towards them, is not their actual goal. Yet the fedi seems to think this makes sense somehow.

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Finally, someone is not insane. Thank you

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This!!! The expense of accommodating the fediverse would be more than the potential revenue gained by a very large margin.

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It makes way more sense to me that the experiment with federation will ultimately be to connect their own services. For example, so you can follow an instagram thot from your facebook, or you can message someone on whatsapp using facebook messenger.

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- They definitely don't need the ActivityPub for that
  
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Permanently Deleted

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If you want the fediverse to work, you have to accept that large companies will want to be part of it.

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They can want. Doesn't mean they should be allowed to.

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- Then the fediverse will fade into obscurity. I know it's hard to accept but walling yourself off from everybody else is not the right way to go.
  
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But it works now

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But mega corporations will eventually want to crush the competition, which means making everyone else's experience worse. I guess that somehow hasn't happened to email, but for most everything else

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- I agree, they need to be kept in check. It's sad the fediverse isn't big enough to force them to behave. Ultimately though, if federated services continue to be hard to understand for the average user, people will slowly leave so that they can interact with normal people.
  
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It's working already and we aren't a company that needs to grow endlessly, I rather be smaller and high quality than be take over by the bots on threads and meta.

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This. Anything with a million users is chock full of megacorps. The noteworthy bit is that this isn’t run exclusively by one of them.

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And, making places they have no part in is trivially easy. IF FB attempts to federate with other fediverse services, they can be defederated by anyone that cares to.

There are lots of humans (the big hairless apes who create everything of value that happens on the internet), who do not want to be a part of Meta’s network. Those humans (that’s us) can always make a place for themselves. The last few weeks have proven that there are enough of us for the community to hit the necessary scale. Unless FB starts doing murders, that will not change for quite a while.

I do not understand the freak out here over threads, this is not an existential threat. At worst it is a reminder that we will not “win” the war, but it’s a war that we should even bother show up for.

Bluesky creating a competing standard is far worse than meta implementing the existing one.

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- Exactly, it’s overblown is what it is! Many concerns are legitimate, but the beauty of the fediverse is that if you don’t like a site that uses it then such sites are super easy to avoid by joining/making an instance that’s defedded from it. We need to realize that Lemmy is not Reddit, we don’t have to all use the same site anymore. This, along with yesterday’s griefing of lemmy.world, should serve as an example of why we shouldn’t just know of this new power to create and sub to communities on other instances- we should milk it for all it’s worth, along with the ability for most lemmy/kbin/whatever apps to have multiple alts across different instances all logged in at once.
  
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Colonise? Lol. I'm pretty sure meta doesn't care that much about us.

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They want to prevent us from ever becoming an alternative to their platforms

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- Trust me we’ve done a good enough job of that on our own lol. I mean I love it here, but everyone I’ve shown this concept to is immediately confused and intimidated. Maybe it’s still early days, but it’s difficult for me to imagine this ever catching on outside of niche tech circles.
  
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- All while they're the alternative to this platform.
  
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- Lmao I don't think they're ever worried about that. The fedi isn't exactly new. Not to mention the mastodon community isn't exactly gen z influencers.
  
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Um, did you think colonisers ever cared about the people they colonised?

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I don’t share everyone’s pessimism at all. All I’m thinking about is hundreds of millions of people using ActivityPub who would otherwise stay on Facebook and Instagram. That’s a huge pool of new users for the protocol, and many of them will end up on Lemmy. This is best case scenario for growing an open protocol.

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Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I think it's naive to assume Meta is embracing ActivityPub out of the goodness of their heart, effectively giving free content away to federated instances with no strings attached.

I think it's also naive to assume Threads users will migrate to the Fediverse proper and not just interact through Threads. The vast majority of those users may not even realise they're interacting with people outside of Threads.

I don't believe it'll translate to a growing community, it may very well oversaturate us instead.

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- This is not cynicism. It's realism. Corporations (especially Meta) have no heart, soul, or care for any externalities to the generation of profit.
  
  The best case is that they will slowly ease into things by contributing to FOSS repos/projects while silently developing proprietary versions or extensions which wall it off.
  
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- I don’t think anyone suggested Meta is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. I certainly didn’t write that. They want to make money.
  
  As for cross-pollination, it’s basically a law in SaaS now. When you expose users to something, some of them engage. Meta can’t hide the existence of other instances else there’s no point in federating. If users are other instances, and interact with users from those instances, some of them will create accounts on those instances.
  
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I don't believe the average person who uses a meta activity pub based social media will ever know about instances beyond theirs and the options to create accounts to get non meta social media. The service will feel no different from Instagram or Twitter and to them just be another site.

The benefit will be more for Facebook to try and entice instance owners to find more users to datamine, and try to influence development in a direction that starts putting them in greater control like Google did to Android.

I don't see this scenario of average people randomly seeking out independent non corporate instances to make accounts in and escape meta. Most are there because they enjoy the Meta experience and the large user base that all congregate there. Meta's only play in this is an attempt to expand their influence to those trying to escape them.

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My primary beef with

huge pool of new users for the protocol

Has to do with the scary-low number of developers working solely on ActivityPub, lemmy, etc - and lack of incentive for more to dive in head first.

This is NOT ready for prime time, and I worry that reliance on devs from Zuck's army will facilitate EEE of the protocol. Slow and steady is better.

Pic related.

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- It’s FOSS. Meta is free to spin off their own version of ActivityPub, but we don’t have to join them. The entire point of federalised instances is to allow competition like this. If Lemmy devs are dropping the ball then other developers will compete for a better user experience. Competition rocks and I’m looking forward to it.
  
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- Exactly. ActivityPub needs continued organic growth, not to be inundated by activity from a giant monolithic, social media company controlled instance who's heavily financially incentivised to wipe us out.
  
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Good luck with that.

Especially when everyone is defederating from them.

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#NOPE!

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I would say more

#NOPE!

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My response? It's good to want. That much said, it's not going to happen.

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Gross

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the more I read about thread, the more it resembles thread from the Pern fandom.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if every post/link shared from a threads instance has meta analytic tools and trackers built right into them.

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That's not how ActivityPub works. You can't embed trackers or scripts into posts. You can't even do the basic trackers that emails have(loading a 1px image) since your instance pulls the image from the originating server and caches it.

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- I trust you know how activity pub works much better than I, but I’m a superstitious fellow when it comes to meta & their endless appetite for data that doesn’t belong to them.
  
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- If Meta starts throwing their weight around the W3C to approve changes to ActivityPub that will benefit them, they can very well try to implement tracking.
  
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