I know no one here wants to sign up for Threads because it’s Meta… But damn, as much as I dislike Meta, this was a slam dunk for them. Smart of them to piggy back off IG and allowing the user to...
I know no one here wants to sign up for Threads because it’s Meta… But damn, as much as I dislike Meta, this was a slam dunk for them. Smart of them to piggy back off IG and allowing the user to bring their entire network over so they don’t spend months searching for people.
I signed up for it. I have no dog in the game in the whole ethics of this or that. I don't pay attention to that, and I frankly don't really care about it. I can see the platform blowing up and...
I signed up for it. I have no dog in the game in the whole ethics of this or that. I don't pay attention to that, and I frankly don't really care about it. I can see the platform blowing up and actually taking over twitter (especially since twitter is on its last legs).
It is, essentially, twitter. Filled with influencers that repeat the same unfunny jokes (right now I'm getting a lot of Viners from back in the day but all the ones that sucked like King Bach and Lele Pons).
Hopefully I can eventually carve a niche into it, but I do like the layout. The way the images and the videos are placed and how high quality they are (it's like going from 480p on Twitter to Full HD).
And that's why these companies continue to do unethical crap.
I signed up for it. I have no dog in the game in the whole ethics of this or that. I don't pay attention to that, and I frankly don't really care about it.
And that's why these companies continue to do unethical crap.
Same. It's nice to have places where that stuff does matter, like here. But also I just quite like simple social media as a concept. Lots of people are cool and interesting and I like seeing what...
I signed up for it. I have no dog in the game in the whole ethics of this or that. I don't pay attention to that, and I frankly don't really care about it.
Same. It's nice to have places where that stuff does matter, like here. But also I just quite like simple social media as a concept. Lots of people are cool and interesting and I like seeing what they do and think, especially the people who are my friends from the internet who aren't techie enough to get into old school forums or clunky federation stuff. I couldn't care less what 'data' Meta are harvesting from me. They've been doing it for decades with apparently zero effect on my life so a little more isn't going to hurt.
Filled with influencers that repeat the same unfunny jokes
Yeah, I am definitely going to need a way to filter those people out. If that can happen while I can still have my account public then I think it has potential. Surprised they didn't have hashtags working from day one, but am impressed they have all the filtering/blocking/privacy stuff up and running already. Bluesky, looking at you...
Right now there's a LOT of noise on threads but it's kind of interesting.
I don't hate it, and I hated Twitter from day one (and I was early enough there to get a three letter username). Will be interesting to see how it goes.
It reminds me of when I first joined twitter, and I thought that’s all it was. Until I started following specific journalists, writers, and others that made for a, let’s say less cringey, experience.
Yeah, I am definitely going to need a way to filter those people out.
It reminds me of when I first joined twitter, and I thought that’s all it was. Until I started following specific journalists, writers, and others that made for a, let’s say less cringey, experience.
As far as I can tell, right now, there is no way to limit your feed to just the people and/or tags you want, or at least to mostly just those people. If that doesn't come along fairly soon in some...
As far as I can tell, right now, there is no way to limit your feed to just the people and/or tags you want, or at least to mostly just those people. If that doesn't come along fairly soon in some form then I'm probably done with Threads.
This is one of the big things that bug me the most about it. I figured by importing who I follow on Instagram would make it so I only see posts by them with maybe a few “suggested” posts. However,...
This is one of the big things that bug me the most about it. I figured by importing who I follow on Instagram would make it so I only see posts by them with maybe a few “suggested” posts. However, I am seeing 99% posts from people I don’t follow or have no similarities to the interests that I follow vs. what I actually do follow. Hopefully this changes soon.
Just noticed after opening Threads a couple minutes ago that my feed is now mainly made up of the people I follow vs. tons of random people. Seems like they are updating the feed as more people...
Just noticed after opening Threads a couple minutes ago that my feed is now mainly made up of the people I follow vs. tons of random people. Seems like they are updating the feed as more people are using it. Let’s see if they make it easier to switch accounts in the app and make it more like it is on Instagram. Right now you need to go to the account info, sign out, click switch account and select the one you want. In Instagram, I can just double tap my account icon and it’ll switch.
I'm hoping that medical twitter will move there in some flavor - I follow a lot of medtwitter, and they are the only reason I still have a twitter account (well, that and it is still the best way...
I'm hoping that medical twitter will move there in some flavor - I follow a lot of medtwitter, and they are the only reason I still have a twitter account (well, that and it is still the best way to shame company's customer service into responding, although I imagine that feature will wane very fast).
TBH they just need to attract the coporate, and the influencers. If they jump, the rest follow easily. Shame that I see it as jumping out of a frying pan and into the fire, but I can't even begin...
TBH they just need to attract the coporate, and the influencers. If they jump, the rest follow easily.
Shame that I see it as jumping out of a frying pan and into the fire, but I can't even begin to be suprised at this point that people compromise privacy and security for convinence and community.
Everyone compromises privacy and security for convenience and community, among other things, every single day. We're all doing that right now in fact. The only way to completely avoid it is to...
Everyone compromises privacy and security for convenience and community, among other things, every single day.
We're all doing that right now in fact.
The only way to completely avoid it is to live in a completely uninhabited area with no communication whatsoever.
The question is to the extent we're ok with it, and Meta is just way too far.
Agreed. There's a bit of a caveat with the modern social contract (it's REALLY hard today to simply find land to call your own and truly disassociate from modern world territory), but thats a...
The question is to the extent we're ok with it, and Meta is just way too far.
Agreed. There's a bit of a caveat with the modern social contract (it's REALLY hard today to simply find land to call your own and truly disassociate from modern world territory), but thats a topic for another time.
I can't name an exact line, but I do believe its somewhere short of having data gathered on me despite not even having an account with Meta.
Kind of proves that a portables identity and social graph is what people care about. The various other bells and whistles that the Fediverse platforms rushed to implement before getting the core...
Kind of proves that a portables identity and social graph is what people care about. The various other bells and whistles that the Fediverse platforms rushed to implement before getting the core of that right was a big fumble.
Yup, I had a bunch of people on reddit a while ago who couldn't wrap their heads around why I still have to use discord despite wishing I could use something like Matrix instead. For some reason...
Yup, I had a bunch of people on reddit a while ago who couldn't wrap their heads around why I still have to use discord despite wishing I could use something like Matrix instead.
For some reason the idea that literally no people I know and no group support rooms I have to communicate with are on Matrix, they just couldn't get it through their heads.
They kept trying to tell me I have to be the one to switch to Matrix and then magically matrix will somehow not be completely useless to me for communication now that I'm cut off from every friend and chat room I use or something.
A social media with nobody I want to socialize with is nothing at all.
I just signed up. Never used to use Twitter but nothing much is happening on Mastodon. Whatsapp is my default form of comms anyway so the using Meta quibble is moot.
I just signed up. Never used to use Twitter but nothing much is happening on Mastodon.
Whatsapp is my default form of comms anyway so the using Meta quibble is moot.
Once I heard they'd link IG to it, I realized it would be pretty successful. As much as I loathe Meta, one of the main uses for IG is for artists and other creative types. A lot of people will...
Once I heard they'd link IG to it, I realized it would be pretty successful. As much as I loathe Meta, one of the main uses for IG is for artists and other creative types. A lot of people will have an IG and Twitter account for maximum visibility. With Twitter going down, having an equivalent platform where they can log in with their already existing IG account would be the easiest solution.
I still refuse to make an account for anything Meta-related. However, I can see some of the creative industries making Threads their new home. I know from a friend trying to break into the animation industry that Twitter is one of the largest networking platforms for the industry, so seems like a decent chance they'd move to Threads since many of them likely also have IG accounts.
Well, they certainly need for this to work in a big way. Meta spent a lot on publicity, got all kinds of businesses to produce VR related product for the metaverse and at the end of the day, had...
Well, they certainly need for this to work in a big way.
Meta spent a lot on publicity, got all kinds of businesses to produce VR related product for the metaverse and at the end of the day, had $470 and 38 active daily users to show for it after Year 1.
Downloaded the app and it's asking for an Instagram account, with no button to create one from the app. I don't have an Instagram account so that's a bit of a UX failure for me.
Downloaded the app and it's asking for an Instagram account, with no button to create one from the app. I don't have an Instagram account so that's a bit of a UX failure for me.
Yeah, it's meta. They like linking all their platforms together. I have a facebook so my employer thinks I'm a normal person and to keep up with birthdays, but I can tell I lose braincells just...
Yeah, it's meta. They like linking all their platforms together. I have a facebook so my employer thinks I'm a normal person and to keep up with birthdays, but I can tell I lose braincells just browsing the feed on FB, Twitter, and Insta, and I am not a smart person to begin with.
If you work for a big corp and are in the chain that's high enough to have impact, the way you behave in your personal life can have direct consequences for the business. For some companies, HR...
If you work for a big corp and are in the chain that's high enough to have impact, the way you behave in your personal life can have direct consequences for the business. For some companies, HR checking FB social feeds of employees for behaviour is almost a required thing.
Last thing you need is finding out your finance department is a bunch of neo-nazis on the side.
I see both sides of this coin, which is the reason I don't have a FB account, the Twitter account is not on my phone and only used for corporate shout outs for things like late trains and water leaks and everything else I do is pretty anonymous. Just yesterday the CEO and COO told everyone in the senior management team that the DR trees will be moved to WhatsApp groups for emergency information push. I'm like "No, that's what Teams is for and I don't have WhatsApp. If you want me, you'll need to phone, text, use Teams which is our corporate chatter or Signal. I won't use Meta products out of principle."
If you work for a big corp and are in the chain that's high enough to have impact, the way you behave in your personal life can have direct consequences for the business. For some companies, HR...
If you work for a big corp and are in the chain that's high enough to have impact, the way you behave in your personal life can have direct consequences for the business. For some companies, HR checking FB social feeds of employees for behaviour is almost a required thing.
This is something most companies will do for a large majority of their employees. It is essentially a standard practice for the hiring process in most places now. I’ve seen employees be spoken to by higher ups for things that they post on social media due to how it can be perceived.
On one hand, I totally understand why companies do this. As you said, the last thing you want to find out is that some of your employees are a bunch of neo-Nazis. Whether we agree with it or not, you as the employee, represent your company and people will not hesitate to call your company about your behavior outside of work. On the other hand, I feel your personal life should have no bearing on your job as long as it isn’t affecting your performance at your job or costing your company business. It is all a very fine line that some companies do well at balancing while others cannot seem to figure out.
This is probably an intentional decision by Meta to close off new signups and prioritize existing Meta users. They’ll probably open it up once signs ups are stabilized.
This is probably an intentional decision by Meta to close off new signups and prioritize existing Meta users. They’ll probably open it up once signs ups are stabilized.
Ah, that's the one thing Tildes doesn't have: Meta's money to bring new features come from nowhere. I'm happy for those who think this new service could replace Twitter for them, it's another evil...
Ah, that's the one thing Tildes doesn't have: Meta's money to bring new features come from nowhere.
I'm happy for those who think this new service could replace Twitter for them, it's another evil company, but who cares anymore? If it works, people will be there.
I think it's not for me because I didn't use Twitter, so I have nothing to replace. But the freedom of choice is there, which is nice.
For me I had to open chrome for the first time in a year because the page didn't even load on firefox, then I typed in a profile because there's no real web app, and there's no sign up option there.
For me I had to open chrome for the first time in a year because the page didn't even load on firefox, then I typed in a profile because there's no real web app, and there's no sign up option there.
I think it's a little disingenuous to mention a nearly 30 year old business strategy used by a different company without also mentioning how much it turned out to not even work. Almost all the...
I think it's a little disingenuous to mention a nearly 30 year old business strategy used by a different company without also mentioning how much it turned out to not even work.
Almost all the examples given failed to come about in Microsoft's favour, in the long run. Internet Explorer lost to open web standards. Closed Office document standards ended up not being a thing. De-portabilising Java - didn't work. Linux - no; email - no. Instant Messaging vs AOL, possibly - but MSN ultimately lost that one anyway. IM systems have always been a shitshow, before and after MS got involved.
I really don't think this is what Meta are doing with Threads. The fediverse is far too small and insignificant to bother them. But I have been wrong in the past. At least once in 1994 I got something wrong.
It's very clearly stated in the wiki article, point by point. But in any case, it's irrelevant since microsoft was not the first nor the last to try that strategy, just the ones that named it. ...
I think it's a little disingenuous to mention a nearly 30 year old business strategy used by a different company without also mentioning how much it turned out to not even work.
It's very clearly stated in the wiki article, point by point.
But in any case, it's irrelevant since microsoft was not the first nor the last to try that strategy, just the ones that named it.
But it's not though, that's my point. All of those examples of attempted EEE didn't actually work. With the possible exception of IM where MSN did 'beat' AOL (not ICQ though) - but IM standards...
It's very clearly stated in the wiki article, point by point.
But it's not though, that's my point. All of those examples of attempted EEE didn't actually work. With the possible exception of IM where MSN did 'beat' AOL (not ICQ though) - but IM standards have always been a complete mess and arguably no standard actually 'won' IM until the Signal Protocol came along.
Honestly I think the last time I heard XMPP mentioned was when I was setting up a Jabber server in the early 2000s or so.. Still around though, isn't it? It's not given as an example of EEE on the...
Honestly I think the last time I heard XMPP mentioned was when I was setting up a Jabber server in the early 2000s or so.. Still around though, isn't it? It's not given as an example of EEE on the page linked above.
IM is, as I said, a complete shitshow on many fronts, not all of which were targets for Microsoft's attempts at EEE. They were largely going for AOL at the time, weren't they?
XMPP's failing is that it's not a particularly intuitive or convenient protocol for how people want to chat, nowadays. Having to worry about your server having the right plugins installed so you...
Still around though, isn't it?
XMPP's failing is that it's not a particularly intuitive or convenient protocol for how people want to chat, nowadays. Having to worry about your server having the right plugins installed so you can get functionality like messages syncing between devices, file uploads, and group chats is such a high barrier that almost everyone will chose some other platform.
Did Google trying to EEE it harm it? Probably, but given how the protocol works, it was likely doomed from the start to obscurity.
Mastodon is being completely naive by allowing them to federate with them too. Not only is Meta going to completely influence the culture of Masto by the sheer size of their respective...
Mastodon is being completely naive by allowing them to federate with them too. Not only is Meta going to completely influence the culture of Masto by the sheer size of their respective communities, they will more or less become shitty threads in the eyes of most users.
What drove me away from Facebook ultimately was the insufferability of the userbase, and I would hate to see the community that the fediverse has built so far be swamped by them. They are also still in the wild west phase of user experience and features, something a multimillion dollar company like Meta is going to take full advantage of.
Why would they do that? Threads has already more than quadrupled the entire fediverse userbase and it hasn't even been half a day. The fediverse as it stands right now was never any kind of threat...
Why would they do that?
Threads has already more than quadrupled the entire fediverse userbase and it hasn't even been half a day. The fediverse as it stands right now was never any kind of threat to them. They could have ignored it quite happily and it would have made zero difference to how well Threads went. So they must want to be part of it, not destroy it.
I know you probably think they're unmitigated evil but it is possible that Meta might bring something beneficial to the table - perhaps compute resources, lack of which is a throttle on the fediverse already. Or the massive weight of their technical ability, and whatever you think of Meta in terms of ethics, they have some seriously good engineers (and have made a lot of FOSS contributions over the years). Or just visibility. Millions of people have heard of the fediverse this morning who hadn't before (it's mentioned during Threads sign-up). And if Meta don't make things better? Well, the other instances don't have to join in. It's just a few clicks to de-federate if they want to. It's very much a win-win situation, I think.
Meta is part of the reason social media has embraced outrage in my opinion. They researched and shifted users feeds on Facebook to find how to maximize engagement and found anger sells. [I think...
I don't entirely disagree, with the first point at least. Although that is partly a people problem rather than a Facebook problem (it's neither wholly one nor the other, of course). If people...
I don't entirely disagree, with the first point at least. Although that is partly a people problem rather than a Facebook problem (it's neither wholly one nor the other, of course). If people didn't click on stuff that makes them angry then algorithms that promote stuff that gets clicked on wouldn't promote angry stuff to them.
However, I don't think Facebook invented rage engagement. For as long as the internet has existed, flame wars and trolls have commanded outsize amounts of attention. There's a reason we had words for those things long before FB existed. Several generations of people, long past the end of the last September never learned not to feed the trolls and I believe that has become a significant problem everywhere, not just on Facebook.
Obviously Meta wants clicks and engagement. Mastodon does too. Everyone does. Tildes has features designed to get you to click on stuff and engage with it. Wanting engagement is not a bad thing in and of itself.
Ultimately the value of users to Meta depends on how much they will click on adverts. And while rage might increase stickiness and time on site, more recent data is suggesting that (according to Meta's own internal research which I haven't seen personally but have heard about from a reliable source) angry users are simply less valuable. Which makes sense when you think about it - if you're furious about someone being wrong on the internet, you're hardly going to decide now is the time to go and look at some cheap underpants. Whereas if you've just had a pleasant interaction with someone you like, you might. (ps: if you are on FB/IG, click on some underwear ads, the algorithm will then show you more good-looking people standing around in their pants which makes for a much nicer looking feed than yet more ads for insurance or lawnmowers)
Of course I could be completely wrong and Meta are going to grind Mastodon et al to dust. It won't take long if that's their plan, and while I personally don't really rate the fediverse as it stands right now, it will be a great shame.
It's not a thing to "Agree or disagree" with. It's a fact. Facebook feeds on anger and derision. It counts in people being angry at things it sees, because it generates clicks.
It's not a thing to "Agree or disagree" with. It's a fact.
Facebook feeds on anger and derision. It counts in people being angry at things it sees, because it generates clicks.
That's not my experience of Facebook. I quite like Facebook, despite everything, because it's full of smart, kind and interesting people. aka my friends.. I really don't see very much of the rage...
That's not my experience of Facebook. I quite like Facebook, despite everything, because it's full of smart, kind and interesting people. aka my friends.. I really don't see very much of the rage you say FB feeds on. So it's perhaps not a simple binary.
The article linked above is almost a decade old. So yes, it is true that many years ago FB discovered they could increase some user metrics by promoting angry stuff. But Meta's research division hasn't just been sitting on it's hands since then. Turns out the type and quality of engagement matters more than raw numbers, and it has become clear that angry users are simply not as valuable as happy users. Who wants to advertise to furious people? So Meta have a fairly strong incentive to do somewhat more than feed on anger and derision.
Anyway, can I interest you in some cheap underpants?
When you go to Facebook, do you actually see posts by your friends in your feed? Because that was not my experience before I stopped using Facebook. My feed usually had maybe one post by one of my...
When you go to Facebook, do you actually see posts by your friends in your feed? Because that was not my experience before I stopped using Facebook. My feed usually had maybe one post by one of my friends at the top and the rest were "funny" videos and similar dopamine hits by "recommended" channels and clickbait/outrage-bait posted by friend of a friend of someone I met once at some event posted on Facebook. To see what my friends posted, I had to go to their profiles. That was my experience approximately 2 years ago.
I do mostly just see posts by my friends and the groups I'm in. Caveat to that is I do have a browser extension that cleans FB up a bit, but it's not that aggressive about it. FB is still...
I do mostly just see posts by my friends and the groups I'm in. Caveat to that is I do have a browser extension that cleans FB up a bit, but it's not that aggressive about it. FB is still perfectly usable on my phone without that extension though (no adblockers on either browser or my home network).
You can turn off seeing friend-of-a-friend posts in your settings, iirc.
Absolutely agree, about the history of media rage, I just don't remember hearing about AM radio causing eating disorders, increasing depressive symptoms, then again we do have events like Jones...
Absolutely agree, about the history of media rage, I just don't remember hearing about AM radio causing eating disorders, increasing depressive symptoms, then again we do have events like Jones Town which I haven't seen occur through social media either so we could make arguments about how social media may safely manipulate people who wouldve otherwise been dangerously manipulated.
I do think if you make efforts to curate your ads its a better experience, however that requires a bit of technological literacy some people lack.
I do hope Meta brings more awareness to other media interactions and maybe this connection to the fediverse will bring more media literacy and technological literacy to people who may have not otherwise pursued it because their feed isn't as isolated and curated.
I do hope silos are broken down some what, and bubbles aren't as entrenched. I have to go to so many places to get all the news otherwise I won't hear about it....maybe the fediverse will change that.
I'm pretty sure every new media form has caused some terrible thing or other, or at least been claimed to. But yeah, the whole thing with insta and young people's body image was awful and I really...
I'm pretty sure every new media form has caused some terrible thing or other, or at least been claimed to. But yeah, the whole thing with insta and young people's body image was awful and I really hope they've been working on that (I know for a fact they have, to be honest). Not to excuse Meta on that for a second, but I remember that same problem coming from the teen-magazine market that blew up in the late 80-90s.
I think Meta are increasingly aware of the power they have and that people feel they should take more responsibility for that. Zuck at least has always been "X thing is a people problem, we didn't cause it, we just mediate people, what they do isn't our fault" but I do get the sense that is changing a bit. If nothing else it's a bad look, and bad looks cost money.
We shall see. I am faintly hopeful that things are changing a bit for the better. It feels like this time around things might just be a bit different, a bit more open, a bit more flexible, a bit nicer. Perhaps not as much as I'd like, but something is better than nothing.
Funny you should mention AM radio. From what I've read, conservative talk radio hosted by people like Rush Limbaugh was what practically saved it from extinction with how FM radio was taking over...
Funny you should mention AM radio. From what I've read, conservative talk radio hosted by people like Rush Limbaugh was what practically saved it from extinction with how FM radio was taking over the music space. So with that in mind, you can say that AM radio has caused outrage and probably mental health decline in its listeners.
Have you heard of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? Microsoft did it in the 90s, Google did it with XMP, and there are probably more examples out there. Meta is evil and out for our data. If you trust...
Have you heard of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? Microsoft did it in the 90s, Google did it with XMP, and there are probably more examples out there. Meta is evil and out for our data. If you trust them at all, you don’t know Zuck. If he was truly someone with good intentions for society, he’d commit suicide after destroying Facebook and the physical servers it and its backups are on.
I know about EEE. Almost none of the things MS tried to extinguish actually got extinguished. XMPP wasn't killed by Google, it killed itself by just not being very good. EEE isn't a thing that has...
I know about EEE. Almost none of the things MS tried to extinguish actually got extinguished. XMPP wasn't killed by Google, it killed itself by just not being very good. EEE isn't a thing that has ever conclusively happened as far as I can find out. fwiw I was there back in the day, I was a front-line web dev right in the most brutal days of the browser wars. I've seen things..
Meta might be "evil", although I don't think that's true, but they're not stupid. They don't need to fight this fight. I love the concept but realistically the fediverse is a handful of smart, techie people mostly discussing what the fediverse should be. If they are enjoying that, great - Mastodon could have been the next Twitter but they didn't want to be and that's totally OK. I don't have a problem with the fediverse.
But it's about as much threat to Meta as my mum is. Threads grew bigger that the entire fediverse in less than an hour, and cleared twenty times it's size in less than a day. Zuck doesn't care about a couple of million techie people fiddling about on their little hobby servers, he cares about user counts in the billions and for better or worse he's done that three times already (Facebook, Insta and Whatsapp).
What do Meta have to gain by squishing Mastodon/etc? It's not "our data" - whatever that even means and after more years than I care to remember of using Meta/Google/MS products without using any data contraception not one negative thing has happened to me on the 'data' front - because they can't get that from non-Threads users.
ActivityPub is a smart protocol. Meta can't just waltz into the fediverse and help itself to everyone's "data". This has been confirmed for Mastodon by Eugen Rochko. He's also said that EEE just isn't possible, technically. Meta couldn't extinguish the fediverse even if they wanted to. So what is it? Why are they doing this?
Also while you might well dislike Zuck - and I do too, he seems to be a super creepy and unlikeable weird dude - but suggesting people should kill themselves really isn't a great look.
If Meta successfully joins the fediverse, it can add new features (embrace and extend) that other instances don't have. Like with Google and XMPP, it can eventually be the main reason people go...
If Meta successfully joins the fediverse, it can add new features (embrace and extend) that other instances don't have. Like with Google and XMPP, it can eventually be the main reason people go there--for Meta, not for other instances. Once it has enough control, it can kill off the competition. No decentralized websites and they have all of the information. In essence, it's trying, in my theory, to be the next Reddit. Is that a lot of ifs? Yes, but this is Meta and Zuckerberg we're talking about. His entire shtick is making products that siphon data from users.
ActivityPub is a smart protocol. Meta can't just waltz into the fediverse and help itself to everyone's "data". This has been confirmed for Mastodon by Eugen Rochko. He's also said that EEE just isn't possible, technically. Meta couldn't extinguish the fediverse even if they wanted to. So what is it? Why are they doing this?
The Metaverse failed, but if he can take control of the fediverse then he'll still gather tons of data that he wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain. It's kind of an alternative Reddit, if you will. He could want all of the data Reddit has, but just opening up a competitor to it wouldn't work. But with what Reddit is doing right now and the rise of Mastodon and ActivityPub, this could be his best shot to get in early and, one day, be able to extinguish competition if he is successful enough and gets that far.
As for Microsoft, they themselves coined the term "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish." They've definitely tried, and I believe Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer was a successful attempt by them to kill off NN. Microsoft Office was another attempt that seemed successful since it's so widely used today.
Meta can't "take control" of the fediverse. That's not how it works, decentralised systems are designed specifically to avoid centralised control. Meta can't turn off Mastodon or Lemmy instances,...
Meta can't "take control" of the fediverse. That's not how it works, decentralised systems are designed specifically to avoid centralised control. Meta can't turn off Mastodon or Lemmy instances, or make them defederate from each other. Whatever Meta do or don't do with Threads, the fediverse will still exist. Threads is not an existential threat to Mastodon (and vice-versa). Read the blog post I linked.
If "data" is the goal, Zuck can scrape the fediverse already - just like he can reddit, and tildes and twitter and so on. I'm not sure what "data" you think they want, but within the fediverse they can only get non-public data from their own users and that won't change. If they do "extend" ActivityPub to allow that, they will no longer be part of the fediverse proper so.. that data will remain inaccessible.
I'm literally using Netscape code to make this post. You know Netscape founded and then essentially became Mozilla, right? IE is dead and gone, it lost - Netscape lives on as Firefox. ActiveX is dead and the web runs on the open standard ECMAScript. Java running on Linux systems number in the billions today (aka Android), so MS's attempts to EEE both Java and Linux failed too.
Office's EEE strategy didn't work either - office document formats have been open for years now, they're just XML. Most people use Office not because of EEE from 25 years ago but because Microsoft offer a very good enterprise package. So businesses buy it. They don't need to, you can use docx/etc in LibreOffice or OpenOffice or whatever and in my last job I regularly did just that. It's entirely possible to interact with MS Office without having Office. But there's more to software purchasing decisions than file formats.
Seriously, look around you. EEE is not a thing that works and I'm not aware of a single example where it can be said to conclusively have done so. Open standards are everywhere. ActivityPub is just another great open standard whose time might just be arriving soon. Without Meta's involvement it probably won't though.
I don't mean control like the way they control Facebook. Rather, Meta is probably (my theory) trying to become the mainstay for the fediverse in the way Google took charge over XMPP users. Yes,...
I don't mean control like the way they control Facebook. Rather, Meta is probably (my theory) trying to become the mainstay for the fediverse in the way Google took charge over XMPP users. Yes, they cannot turn off other instances, but if they get large enough then they can--like Google did--make the other instances exactly that: other instances. They get "control" of the fediverse by being the de facto leader with the most users.
Maybe you're correct. I hope so. But anything Meta does I will be skeptical of. I never knew about Netscape becoming Mozilla. If that's really true, that's neat.
i also think that, if the fediverse just can’t handle someone as large as Meta joining it, then what’s even the point? it was never going to work then… the whole point of it being decentralised is...
i also think that, if the fediverse just can’t handle someone as large as Meta joining it, then what’s even the point? it was never going to work then… the whole point of it being decentralised is to prevent that sort of takeover!
Nah, sorry. I'm not gonna participate in this spat between two billionaires using their platforms to show their e-peen to each other. To be honest I hope they both fail.
Nah, sorry. I'm not gonna participate in this spat between two billionaires using their platforms to show their e-peen to each other. To be honest I hope they both fail.
I am a Twitter user. Regardless of the things going on there it still has the best technical content creators of any social media app. I think the problem with migrating to new a platform is it...
I am a Twitter user. Regardless of the things going on there it still has the best technical content creators of any social media app. I think the problem with migrating to new a platform is it requires all of the people to migrate at the same time or you flip flop between apps and eventually settle back into routines.
Threads has made this even harder, because without tags you can't discover anything without looking for specific users.
Never really got the idea behind microblogging.I have a twitter account which I'll occasionally log into if some big controversy is kicking off and I want to get a feel for which way the zeitgeist...
Never really got the idea behind microblogging.I have a twitter account which I'll occasionally log into if some big controversy is kicking off and I want to get a feel for which way the zeitgeist is going on it but I've never tweeted in all the time I've had it.
I don't use Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. I have accounts on all of them, but only for when I use them to find out whats going in the world on rare occasions. Will likely create an account with...
I don't use Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. I have accounts on all of them, but only for when I use them to find out whats going in the world on rare occasions. Will likely create an account with Threads but never use it. I don't care to describe and archieve my personal life for all to see.
Think currently its a mobile app only. There might be plans for a web app in the future but not entirely sure. The mobile apps are surprisingly native apps, not react native. The Android lead for...
Think currently its a mobile app only. There might be plans for a web app in the future but not entirely sure. The mobile apps are surprisingly native apps, not react native. The Android lead for Threads posted earlier about how they used Jetpack Compose for the Android version.
I would love to be able to interact (mostly read/follow) with Threads without having an account. Does anyone know of a good Mastodon instance that’s federating with Threads?
I would love to be able to interact (mostly read/follow) with Threads without having an account.
Does anyone know of a good Mastodon instance that’s federating with Threads?
Threads is not federating yet, and due to how the Fediverse works, it would not really be possible to browse in the manner you would like without having an account on the threads.net instance itself.
Threads is not federating yet, and due to how the Fediverse works, it would not really be possible to browse in the manner you would like without having an account on the threads.net instance itself.
I know no one here wants to sign up for Threads because it’s Meta… But damn, as much as I dislike Meta, this was a slam dunk for them. Smart of them to piggy back off IG and allowing the user to bring their entire network over so they don’t spend months searching for people.
I signed up for it. I have no dog in the game in the whole ethics of this or that. I don't pay attention to that, and I frankly don't really care about it. I can see the platform blowing up and actually taking over twitter (especially since twitter is on its last legs).
It is, essentially, twitter. Filled with influencers that repeat the same unfunny jokes (right now I'm getting a lot of Viners from back in the day but all the ones that sucked like King Bach and Lele Pons).
Hopefully I can eventually carve a niche into it, but I do like the layout. The way the images and the videos are placed and how high quality they are (it's like going from 480p on Twitter to Full HD).
And that's why these companies continue to do unethical crap.
100%. There is a Pericles quote about politics that applies just as well here.
Same. It's nice to have places where that stuff does matter, like here. But also I just quite like simple social media as a concept. Lots of people are cool and interesting and I like seeing what they do and think, especially the people who are my friends from the internet who aren't techie enough to get into old school forums or clunky federation stuff. I couldn't care less what 'data' Meta are harvesting from me. They've been doing it for decades with apparently zero effect on my life so a little more isn't going to hurt.
Yeah, I am definitely going to need a way to filter those people out. If that can happen while I can still have my account public then I think it has potential. Surprised they didn't have hashtags working from day one, but am impressed they have all the filtering/blocking/privacy stuff up and running already. Bluesky, looking at you...
Right now there's a LOT of noise on threads but it's kind of interesting.
I don't hate it, and I hated Twitter from day one (and I was early enough there to get a three letter username). Will be interesting to see how it goes.
It reminds me of when I first joined twitter, and I thought that’s all it was. Until I started following specific journalists, writers, and others that made for a, let’s say less cringey, experience.
As far as I can tell, right now, there is no way to limit your feed to just the people and/or tags you want, or at least to mostly just those people. If that doesn't come along fairly soon in some form then I'm probably done with Threads.
This is one of the big things that bug me the most about it. I figured by importing who I follow on Instagram would make it so I only see posts by them with maybe a few “suggested” posts. However, I am seeing 99% posts from people I don’t follow or have no similarities to the interests that I follow vs. what I actually do follow. Hopefully this changes soon.
Just noticed after opening Threads a couple minutes ago that my feed is now mainly made up of the people I follow vs. tons of random people. Seems like they are updating the feed as more people are using it. Let’s see if they make it easier to switch accounts in the app and make it more like it is on Instagram. Right now you need to go to the account info, sign out, click switch account and select the one you want. In Instagram, I can just double tap my account icon and it’ll switch.
Yeah. I'm alarmed at how much... noise there is so far.
Half of my time is muting people. It seems to be getting better once I've blocked all of the cringe meme accounts.
I'm hoping that medical twitter will move there in some flavor - I follow a lot of medtwitter, and they are the only reason I still have a twitter account (well, that and it is still the best way to shame company's customer service into responding, although I imagine that feature will wane very fast).
I won't sign up because I never used Twitter to start with, but I bet a lot of people here will check it out just out of curiosity.
TBH they just need to attract the coporate, and the influencers. If they jump, the rest follow easily.
Shame that I see it as jumping out of a frying pan and into the fire, but I can't even begin to be suprised at this point that people compromise privacy and security for convinence and community.
Everyone compromises privacy and security for convenience and community, among other things, every single day.
We're all doing that right now in fact.
The only way to completely avoid it is to live in a completely uninhabited area with no communication whatsoever.
The question is to the extent we're ok with it, and Meta is just way too far.
Agreed. There's a bit of a caveat with the modern social contract (it's REALLY hard today to simply find land to call your own and truly disassociate from modern world territory), but thats a topic for another time.
I can't name an exact line, but I do believe its somewhere short of having data gathered on me despite not even having an account with Meta.
I'll lurk anywhere once.
Kind of proves that a portables identity and social graph is what people care about. The various other bells and whistles that the Fediverse platforms rushed to implement before getting the core of that right was a big fumble.
Yup, I had a bunch of people on reddit a while ago who couldn't wrap their heads around why I still have to use discord despite wishing I could use something like Matrix instead.
For some reason the idea that literally no people I know and no group support rooms I have to communicate with are on Matrix, they just couldn't get it through their heads.
They kept trying to tell me I have to be the one to switch to Matrix and then magically matrix will somehow not be completely useless to me for communication now that I'm cut off from every friend and chat room I use or something.
A social media with nobody I want to socialize with is nothing at all.
I just signed up. Never used to use Twitter but nothing much is happening on Mastodon.
Whatsapp is my default form of comms anyway so the using Meta quibble is moot.
Once I heard they'd link IG to it, I realized it would be pretty successful. As much as I loathe Meta, one of the main uses for IG is for artists and other creative types. A lot of people will have an IG and Twitter account for maximum visibility. With Twitter going down, having an equivalent platform where they can log in with their already existing IG account would be the easiest solution.
I still refuse to make an account for anything Meta-related. However, I can see some of the creative industries making Threads their new home. I know from a friend trying to break into the animation industry that Twitter is one of the largest networking platforms for the industry, so seems like a decent chance they'd move to Threads since many of them likely also have IG accounts.
Well, they certainly need for this to work in a big way.
Meta spent a lot on publicity, got all kinds of businesses to produce VR related product for the metaverse and at the end of the day, had $470 and 38 active daily users to show for it after Year 1.
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/metaverse-zuckerberg-pr-hype/?ref=thebrowser.com
The metaverse didn't die, cuz it was never alive.
Downloaded the app and it's asking for an Instagram account, with no button to create one from the app. I don't have an Instagram account so that's a bit of a UX failure for me.
Yeah, it's meta. They like linking all their platforms together. I have a facebook so my employer thinks I'm a normal person and to keep up with birthdays, but I can tell I lose braincells just browsing the feed on FB, Twitter, and Insta, and I am not a smart person to begin with.
Your employer saw your Facebook? Fuck that, that feels like corporate overreach to me. They just pay for our time at work, not our whole lives.
If you work for a big corp and are in the chain that's high enough to have impact, the way you behave in your personal life can have direct consequences for the business. For some companies, HR checking FB social feeds of employees for behaviour is almost a required thing.
Last thing you need is finding out your finance department is a bunch of neo-nazis on the side.
I see both sides of this coin, which is the reason I don't have a FB account, the Twitter account is not on my phone and only used for corporate shout outs for things like late trains and water leaks and everything else I do is pretty anonymous. Just yesterday the CEO and COO told everyone in the senior management team that the DR trees will be moved to WhatsApp groups for emergency information push. I'm like "No, that's what Teams is for and I don't have WhatsApp. If you want me, you'll need to phone, text, use Teams which is our corporate chatter or Signal. I won't use Meta products out of principle."
Lead balloon.
If you work for a big corp and are in the chain that's high enough to have impact, the way you behave in your personal life can have direct consequences for the business. For some companies, HR checking FB social feeds of employees for behaviour is almost a required thing.This is something most companies will do for a large majority of their employees. It is essentially a standard practice for the hiring process in most places now. I’ve seen employees be spoken to by higher ups for things that they post on social media due to how it can be perceived.
On one hand, I totally understand why companies do this. As you said, the last thing you want to find out is that some of your employees are a bunch of neo-Nazis. Whether we agree with it or not, you as the employee, represent your company and people will not hesitate to call your company about your behavior outside of work. On the other hand, I feel your personal life should have no bearing on your job as long as it isn’t affecting your performance at your job or costing your company business. It is all a very fine line that some companies do well at balancing while others cannot seem to figure out.
This is probably an intentional decision by Meta to close off new signups and prioritize existing Meta users. They’ll probably open it up once signs ups are stabilized.
So it's invite only (invited by Instagram itself)?
They're copying Tildes!
It sounds like you can sign up if you access through the browser (non mobile).
Ah, that's the one thing Tildes doesn't have: Meta's money to bring new features come from nowhere.
I'm happy for those who think this new service could replace Twitter for them, it's another evil company, but who cares anymore? If it works, people will be there.
I think it's not for me because I didn't use Twitter, so I have nothing to replace. But the freedom of choice is there, which is nice.
For me I had to open chrome for the first time in a year because the page didn't even load on firefox, then I typed in a profile because there's no real web app, and there's no sign up option there.
I’m nervous that, since this is part of the fediverse, this will eventually allow Meta to kill it completely.
We have seen this before: Embrace, extend, and extinguish
I think it's a little disingenuous to mention a nearly 30 year old business strategy used by a different company without also mentioning how much it turned out to not even work.
Almost all the examples given failed to come about in Microsoft's favour, in the long run. Internet Explorer lost to open web standards. Closed Office document standards ended up not being a thing. De-portabilising Java - didn't work. Linux - no; email - no. Instant Messaging vs AOL, possibly - but MSN ultimately lost that one anyway. IM systems have always been a shitshow, before and after MS got involved.
I really don't think this is what Meta are doing with Threads. The fediverse is far too small and insignificant to bother them. But I have been wrong in the past. At least once in 1994 I got something wrong.
It's very clearly stated in the wiki article, point by point.
But in any case, it's irrelevant since microsoft was not the first nor the last to try that strategy, just the ones that named it.
...
But it's not though, that's my point. All of those examples of attempted EEE didn't actually work. With the possible exception of IM where MSN did 'beat' AOL (not ICQ though) - but IM standards have always been a complete mess and arguably no standard actually 'won' IM until the Signal Protocol came along.
When’s the last time you’ve seen XMPP mentioned outside the context of EEE?
Honestly I think the last time I heard XMPP mentioned was when I was setting up a Jabber server in the early 2000s or so.. Still around though, isn't it? It's not given as an example of EEE on the page linked above.
IM is, as I said, a complete shitshow on many fronts, not all of which were targets for Microsoft's attempts at EEE. They were largely going for AOL at the time, weren't they?
XMPP's failing is that it's not a particularly intuitive or convenient protocol for how people want to chat, nowadays. Having to worry about your server having the right plugins installed so you can get functionality like messages syncing between devices, file uploads, and group chats is such a high barrier that almost everyone will chose some other platform.
Did Google trying to EEE it harm it? Probably, but given how the protocol works, it was likely doomed from the start to obscurity.
Mastodon is being completely naive by allowing them to federate with them too. Not only is Meta going to completely influence the culture of Masto by the sheer size of their respective communities, they will more or less become shitty threads in the eyes of most users.
What drove me away from Facebook ultimately was the insufferability of the userbase, and I would hate to see the community that the fediverse has built so far be swamped by them. They are also still in the wild west phase of user experience and features, something a multimillion dollar company like Meta is going to take full advantage of.
Quite a lot of fediverse instance admins have signed a pledge not to federate with Meta: https://fedipact.online/
There was a post about this a few weeks ago.
How to kill a decentralised network (such as the Fediverse)
Why would they do that?
Threads has already more than quadrupled the entire fediverse userbase and it hasn't even been half a day. The fediverse as it stands right now was never any kind of threat to them. They could have ignored it quite happily and it would have made zero difference to how well Threads went. So they must want to be part of it, not destroy it.
I know you probably think they're unmitigated evil but it is possible that Meta might bring something beneficial to the table - perhaps compute resources, lack of which is a throttle on the fediverse already. Or the massive weight of their technical ability, and whatever you think of Meta in terms of ethics, they have some seriously good engineers (and have made a lot of FOSS contributions over the years). Or just visibility. Millions of people have heard of the fediverse this morning who hadn't before (it's mentioned during Threads sign-up). And if Meta don't make things better? Well, the other instances don't have to join in. It's just a few clicks to de-federate if they want to. It's very much a win-win situation, I think.
Meta is part of the reason social media has embraced outrage in my opinion.
They researched and shifted users feeds on Facebook to find how to maximize engagement and found anger sells.
[I think they want to engage and outrage the fediverse so they can continue their clicks and proganda state] (https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/ ).
I don't entirely disagree, with the first point at least. Although that is partly a people problem rather than a Facebook problem (it's neither wholly one nor the other, of course). If people didn't click on stuff that makes them angry then algorithms that promote stuff that gets clicked on wouldn't promote angry stuff to them.
However, I don't think Facebook invented rage engagement. For as long as the internet has existed, flame wars and trolls have commanded outsize amounts of attention. There's a reason we had words for those things long before FB existed. Several generations of people, long past the end of the last September never learned not to feed the trolls and I believe that has become a significant problem everywhere, not just on Facebook.
Obviously Meta wants clicks and engagement. Mastodon does too. Everyone does. Tildes has features designed to get you to click on stuff and engage with it. Wanting engagement is not a bad thing in and of itself.
Ultimately the value of users to Meta depends on how much they will click on adverts. And while rage might increase stickiness and time on site, more recent data is suggesting that (according to Meta's own internal research which I haven't seen personally but have heard about from a reliable source) angry users are simply less valuable. Which makes sense when you think about it - if you're furious about someone being wrong on the internet, you're hardly going to decide now is the time to go and look at some cheap underpants. Whereas if you've just had a pleasant interaction with someone you like, you might. (ps: if you are on FB/IG, click on some underwear ads, the algorithm will then show you more good-looking people standing around in their pants which makes for a much nicer looking feed than yet more ads for insurance or lawnmowers)
Of course I could be completely wrong and Meta are going to grind Mastodon et al to dust. It won't take long if that's their plan, and while I personally don't really rate the fediverse as it stands right now, it will be a great shame.
It's not a thing to "Agree or disagree" with. It's a fact.
Facebook feeds on anger and derision. It counts in people being angry at things it sees, because it generates clicks.
That's not my experience of Facebook. I quite like Facebook, despite everything, because it's full of smart, kind and interesting people. aka my friends.. I really don't see very much of the rage you say FB feeds on. So it's perhaps not a simple binary.
The article linked above is almost a decade old. So yes, it is true that many years ago FB discovered they could increase some user metrics by promoting angry stuff. But Meta's research division hasn't just been sitting on it's hands since then. Turns out the type and quality of engagement matters more than raw numbers, and it has become clear that angry users are simply not as valuable as happy users. Who wants to advertise to furious people? So Meta have a fairly strong incentive to do somewhat more than feed on anger and derision.
Anyway, can I interest you in some cheap underpants?
When you go to Facebook, do you actually see posts by your friends in your feed? Because that was not my experience before I stopped using Facebook. My feed usually had maybe one post by one of my friends at the top and the rest were "funny" videos and similar dopamine hits by "recommended" channels and clickbait/outrage-bait posted by friend of a friend of someone I met once at some event posted on Facebook. To see what my friends posted, I had to go to their profiles. That was my experience approximately 2 years ago.
I do mostly just see posts by my friends and the groups I'm in. Caveat to that is I do have a browser extension that cleans FB up a bit, but it's not that aggressive about it. FB is still perfectly usable on my phone without that extension though (no adblockers on either browser or my home network).
You can turn off seeing friend-of-a-friend posts in your settings, iirc.
I mean....
I like underpants ..
And I like cheap...
So, yes?
Absolutely agree, about the history of media rage, I just don't remember hearing about AM radio causing eating disorders, increasing depressive symptoms, then again we do have events like Jones Town which I haven't seen occur through social media either so we could make arguments about how social media may safely manipulate people who wouldve otherwise been dangerously manipulated.
I do think if you make efforts to curate your ads its a better experience, however that requires a bit of technological literacy some people lack.
I do hope Meta brings more awareness to other media interactions and maybe this connection to the fediverse will bring more media literacy and technological literacy to people who may have not otherwise pursued it because their feed isn't as isolated and curated.
I do hope silos are broken down some what, and bubbles aren't as entrenched. I have to go to so many places to get all the news otherwise I won't hear about it....maybe the fediverse will change that.
I'm pretty sure every new media form has caused some terrible thing or other, or at least been claimed to. But yeah, the whole thing with insta and young people's body image was awful and I really hope they've been working on that (I know for a fact they have, to be honest). Not to excuse Meta on that for a second, but I remember that same problem coming from the teen-magazine market that blew up in the late 80-90s.
I think Meta are increasingly aware of the power they have and that people feel they should take more responsibility for that. Zuck at least has always been "X thing is a people problem, we didn't cause it, we just mediate people, what they do isn't our fault" but I do get the sense that is changing a bit. If nothing else it's a bad look, and bad looks cost money.
We shall see. I am faintly hopeful that things are changing a bit for the better. It feels like this time around things might just be a bit different, a bit more open, a bit more flexible, a bit nicer. Perhaps not as much as I'd like, but something is better than nothing.
Funny you should mention AM radio. From what I've read, conservative talk radio hosted by people like Rush Limbaugh was what practically saved it from extinction with how FM radio was taking over the music space. So with that in mind, you can say that AM radio has caused outrage and probably mental health decline in its listeners.
Have you heard of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? Microsoft did it in the 90s, Google did it with XMP, and there are probably more examples out there. Meta is evil and out for our data. If you trust them at all, you don’t know Zuck. If he was truly someone with good intentions for society, he’d commit suicide after destroying Facebook and the physical servers it and its backups are on.
I know about EEE. Almost none of the things MS tried to extinguish actually got extinguished. XMPP wasn't killed by Google, it killed itself by just not being very good. EEE isn't a thing that has ever conclusively happened as far as I can find out. fwiw I was there back in the day, I was a front-line web dev right in the most brutal days of the browser wars. I've seen things..
Meta might be "evil", although I don't think that's true, but they're not stupid. They don't need to fight this fight. I love the concept but realistically the fediverse is a handful of smart, techie people mostly discussing what the fediverse should be. If they are enjoying that, great - Mastodon could have been the next Twitter but they didn't want to be and that's totally OK. I don't have a problem with the fediverse.
But it's about as much threat to Meta as my mum is. Threads grew bigger that the entire fediverse in less than an hour, and cleared twenty times it's size in less than a day. Zuck doesn't care about a couple of million techie people fiddling about on their little hobby servers, he cares about user counts in the billions and for better or worse he's done that three times already (Facebook, Insta and Whatsapp).
What do Meta have to gain by squishing Mastodon/etc? It's not "our data" - whatever that even means and after more years than I care to remember of using Meta/Google/MS products without using any data contraception not one negative thing has happened to me on the 'data' front - because they can't get that from non-Threads users.
ActivityPub is a smart protocol. Meta can't just waltz into the fediverse and help itself to everyone's "data". This has been confirmed for Mastodon by Eugen Rochko. He's also said that EEE just isn't possible, technically. Meta couldn't extinguish the fediverse even if they wanted to. So what is it? Why are they doing this?
Also while you might well dislike Zuck - and I do too, he seems to be a super creepy and unlikeable weird dude - but suggesting people should kill themselves really isn't a great look.
If Meta successfully joins the fediverse, it can add new features (embrace and extend) that other instances don't have. Like with Google and XMPP, it can eventually be the main reason people go there--for Meta, not for other instances. Once it has enough control, it can kill off the competition. No decentralized websites and they have all of the information. In essence, it's trying, in my theory, to be the next Reddit. Is that a lot of ifs? Yes, but this is Meta and Zuckerberg we're talking about. His entire shtick is making products that siphon data from users.
The Metaverse failed, but if he can take control of the fediverse then he'll still gather tons of data that he wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain. It's kind of an alternative Reddit, if you will. He could want all of the data Reddit has, but just opening up a competitor to it wouldn't work. But with what Reddit is doing right now and the rise of Mastodon and ActivityPub, this could be his best shot to get in early and, one day, be able to extinguish competition if he is successful enough and gets that far.
As for Microsoft, they themselves coined the term "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish." They've definitely tried, and I believe Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer was a successful attempt by them to kill off NN. Microsoft Office was another attempt that seemed successful since it's so widely used today.
Meta can't "take control" of the fediverse. That's not how it works, decentralised systems are designed specifically to avoid centralised control. Meta can't turn off Mastodon or Lemmy instances, or make them defederate from each other. Whatever Meta do or don't do with Threads, the fediverse will still exist. Threads is not an existential threat to Mastodon (and vice-versa). Read the blog post I linked.
If "data" is the goal, Zuck can scrape the fediverse already - just like he can reddit, and tildes and twitter and so on. I'm not sure what "data" you think they want, but within the fediverse they can only get non-public data from their own users and that won't change. If they do "extend" ActivityPub to allow that, they will no longer be part of the fediverse proper so.. that data will remain inaccessible.
I'm literally using Netscape code to make this post. You know Netscape founded and then essentially became Mozilla, right? IE is dead and gone, it lost - Netscape lives on as Firefox. ActiveX is dead and the web runs on the open standard ECMAScript. Java running on Linux systems number in the billions today (aka Android), so MS's attempts to EEE both Java and Linux failed too.
Office's EEE strategy didn't work either - office document formats have been open for years now, they're just XML. Most people use Office not because of EEE from 25 years ago but because Microsoft offer a very good enterprise package. So businesses buy it. They don't need to, you can use docx/etc in LibreOffice or OpenOffice or whatever and in my last job I regularly did just that. It's entirely possible to interact with MS Office without having Office. But there's more to software purchasing decisions than file formats.
Seriously, look around you. EEE is not a thing that works and I'm not aware of a single example where it can be said to conclusively have done so. Open standards are everywhere. ActivityPub is just another great open standard whose time might just be arriving soon. Without Meta's involvement it probably won't though.
I don't mean control like the way they control Facebook. Rather, Meta is probably (my theory) trying to become the mainstay for the fediverse in the way Google took charge over XMPP users. Yes, they cannot turn off other instances, but if they get large enough then they can--like Google did--make the other instances exactly that: other instances. They get "control" of the fediverse by being the de facto leader with the most users.
Maybe you're correct. I hope so. But anything Meta does I will be skeptical of. I never knew about Netscape becoming Mozilla. If that's really true, that's neat.
i also think that, if the fediverse just can’t handle someone as large as Meta joining it, then what’s even the point? it was never going to work then… the whole point of it being decentralised is to prevent that sort of takeover!
Nah, sorry. I'm not gonna participate in this spat between two billionaires using their platforms to show their e-peen to each other. To be honest I hope they both fail.
I am a Twitter user. Regardless of the things going on there it still has the best technical content creators of any social media app. I think the problem with migrating to new a platform is it requires all of the people to migrate at the same time or you flip flop between apps and eventually settle back into routines.
Threads has made this even harder, because without tags you can't discover anything without looking for specific users.
Never really got the idea behind microblogging.I have a twitter account which I'll occasionally log into if some big controversy is kicking off and I want to get a feel for which way the zeitgeist is going on it but I've never tweeted in all the time I've had it.
I don't use Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. I have accounts on all of them, but only for when I use them to find out whats going in the world on rare occasions. Will likely create an account with Threads but never use it. I don't care to describe and archieve my personal life for all to see.
I'm curious, is this a mobile app-only thing or is there a Threads webapp?
Think currently its a mobile app only. There might be plans for a web app in the future but not entirely sure. The mobile apps are surprisingly native apps, not react native. The Android lead for Threads posted earlier about how they used Jetpack Compose for the Android version.
I would love to be able to interact (mostly read/follow) with Threads without having an account.
Does anyone know of a good Mastodon instance that’s federating with Threads?
Threads is not federating yet, and due to how the Fediverse works, it would not really be possible to browse in the manner you would like without having an account on the threads.net instance itself.
SAGE
stupid sexy meta