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I think people are over reacting to the launch of Threads by Meta (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I am actually looking forward to threads taking off. I, as a mastodon user, will be able to follow my friends, celebrities, artists and interact with them when federation is activated. It is hard to get friends on to mastodon. The software is great and is better than Twitter, but the people are not on Mastodon but on Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Now, I know platforms by Meta (Facebook) are terrible and spy and leech out pretty much all the data from users. I am also aware that Meta has some hidden agenda behind the launch of threads. Yes, I also read about EEE(Embrace, Extend and Extinguish). Even if Threads decides to drop federation/activitypub, I don't think the fediverse will be harmed. I quote the founder of Mastodon

There are comparisons to be made between Meta adopting ActivityPub for its new social media platform and Meta adopting XMPP for its Messenger service a decade ago. There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

I think many instance admins are all ready to defederate with threads. It just doesn't feel right. Imo, we should welcome users from threads and see how it goes.

What are your thoughts?

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

The fediverse is overreacting in a hysterical manner with the Meta federation. Unlike the https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html article suggests, XMPP is a bad comparison, because the protocol itself was destined to fail, to quote tapoxi:

I was a weird XMPP nerd in high school and tried to switch friends from AIM. So here's my experience.

Onboarding was difficult. There was no obvious choice of server or client to use.

Adding friends was difficult. You needed to send a subscription request to a contact, and they needed to send one to you. If anything happened during this process, you couldn't chat.

Popular XMPP clients, like Pidgin, also supported the other chat services (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc) so people just continued using those.

Network effect. You need to convince a mass of people its better, otherwise nobody's using it because no-one uses it.

No obvious benefit to the user. It's decentralized sure, but there weren't many improvements over AIM that people actually used.

A lack of good iPhone XMPP clients`

It also struggled with proper handling of multi-device setups with synchronization. There is a reason why XMPP is gone and we have WebRTC, Matrix and others instead, even on the open source side of things.

And the Microsoft Office analogy does not hold up, its data format pretends it is open, it is no open software anyways.

Mastodon made it clear they will not accept venture capital, the corporations cannot highjack the development of Mastodon. If anything we will see forks like the Star Office, Open Office and Libre Office situation in the far future.

I also would like to keep communication channels open to most other instances and networks and will leave those anti corporation blockers. You are not going to tell me with whom I may interact. Keep the invasiveness to a minimum to not flood the network with hateful crap. People looking for designated safe spaces with limited scale communities have otherwise brilliant opportunity to do so.

It is totally wild how people think an instance could be possibly toxic and apply that to Meta, and Meta alone. The entire fediverse must be distrustful, because anyone can hookup. With the recent growth I see more and more drama of immature instance admins throwing tantrums who their users are allowed to interact with, because of some astrological misalignment as with the mastodon.art drama. As an instance admin, you have the role of an ISP, you are not a community mod. Know your place.

lemmy.world itself is the "Meta" of the Threadiverse thanks to its gigantic size alone, speaking of EEE. There is already a "rogue" fediverse in the form of the right wing gab.ai etc.

We will end up with about a dozen huge instances and the rest will have barely any relevance as with E-Mail providers. But it will be still diverse and big enough that EEE is not going to happen.